How I'm looking forward to my three apple trees bearing fruit. Not just because the apples taste so much better than any you get in a supermarket, but because they won't be ready to eat for a few months. So my fond hope is that by that time we'll be having a glorious summer and this awful, horrible time will have passed.
My pear tree is about 50 years old and died a few years ago. It's now started to lean (we were trying to get a tree surgeon in but don't know what's going to happen with that now), and our live-in squirrels have now created a burrow for themselves under the roots - lots of dug out soil and bark scattered around. Over the years I've found they love that tree - it's the only one they consistently strip bark from for their own use. I absolutely love to see them bounding around the garden, having the time of their lives without a care that we humans are living with covid-19.
The school playing field alongside us is now a building site; with dense housing being thrown up. The development seems to have stopped for now, so perhaps we'll be lucky enough to get our resident foxes and hedgehogs back. All of our resident wildlife, including the many types of birds, seem to have happily co-existed for the time we've lived in this property, and my hope is that even if this situation is so awful for all of us wildlife will benefit; at least for a time.
My mum used to love sitting in my garden - she found it such a peaceful place when her mind was driving her mad (although she and I didn't know that at the time). For the last five years I've not made use of my garden because of that (too many painful memories), and she died last year. This year I am looking at my garden as a beacon of hope in a scary world.
Thoughts with all of you who are needing to deal with the current situation when you were already living in a desparately difficult world xx