We have a relatively bare garden, with a large expanse of neglected mossy lawn, a few bushes (one jasmin, a row of lilacs, and several unidentified bushes) and several cherry trees. The cherry trees totally dominate the garden. There’s a large one at the back and another one at the front, and both are about as tall as the whole building. A third, smaller one has been added to the front side more recently.

In the photos we saw when we were buying the house, the trees were in bloom and looked quite stunning. Now the flowers have become cherries, and quite good ones. Smallish, tart rather than sweet, but with a rich taste. We’ve been sorting through the fallen ones and picking the ones we can reach from a step ladder, but many of the ripest ones, shiny and plump and almost black, remain tantalisingly out of reach.

Ingrid likes cherries, although she hasn’t quite figured out that the best ones are darkest. She takes whichever one is closest to her. She’s generally understood that one spits out the pits, but when she’s in a hurry she sometimes eats the pits, too. Other times, when I remind her to spit it out, she spits out half the cherry. More practice is in order, I think.

Birds like our cherries, too. When I go out into the garden I often scare off a pigeon or two who’ve been eating in the tree. (And then they leave large blue blobs of bird shit behind them.) We also have a lot of magpies around here, but they mostly fly around and make a lot of noise – I’m not sure if they eat any cherries. Blackbirds and sparrows are also frequent visitors, and some woodpeckers, too. One of our bedroom windows has a pigeon-shaped imprint since one of them hit it head on, and a woodpecker hit a veranda window from the inside (having flown in but then gotten confused about the way out).

The garden is home to lots of snails. They come out after rain and congregate on top of the root cellar. I wonder where they hide when it’s dry?

There is also at least one hedgehog in the neighbourhood, as I saw it potter along a hedgerow one afternoon, and deer. The deer are not the least bit shy, and one morning Eric saw one standing in the garden when he got up. They’re generally reviled by garden owners since they eat the leaves off all kinds of plants (including tulips and strawberries) and probably strip the bark off bushes in winter, but since we have nothing but grass, they’re welcome to stay here for now.

Saturday:

Good weather, so we went (cycled, really) to the London Wetland Centre. Part of it is sort of a bird zoo, with water birds from various parts of the world. They live out in the open but have had their wings clipped, I think. A larger part is just wetlands, open for any bird who happens to pass. A fair proportion of their guests are common ones such as mallards (Swe. gräsand, Est. sinikael-part) and Canada geese, and quite a lot of pigeons as well… Also coots and moorhens (sothöna and rörhöna / lauk and tait), gulls and terns, and then of course numerous other critters we had no names for.

(Nice to link Swedish names of birds I know, to English names of birds I’ve heard of. Google is good! I now also know that kabbleka / varsakabi is called marsh marigold in English.)

In fact we were a bit surprised that the pigeons hadn’t just taken over. There’s free food after all. We asked one of the staff what they did to control the pigeons. He didn’t really know (I guess we picked the wrong person) but mentioned that they try to make the feeding stations less appealing to pigeons – covered trays on the water’s edge, instead of open trays, etc.

Mallards are all used to people I guess, and coots were walking happily on the paths. For shyer birds, a large area had been declared off-limits for walkers. There are viewing stations (huts with lots of windows on all sides) on the edge of that area for bird-watchers. The most serious ones had obviously installed themselves for a long session, with big cameras / telescopes, books and notepads. The Wetland Centre even publish their sightings of rarer birds.

Me, I didn’t really care much about what species they all were… I just liked the sunshine, greenery and open air, and seeing birds up close. For example, one small group of ducks very kindly did their diving in shallow water just next to a wooden platform, so we could see them from above as they dived down and swam underwater. It was interesting to see how they moved – for example, how they flexed and folded their feet, how they held them out towards the side while swimming, and how they spread out their tail feathers for better control under water.

Sunday:
Household tasks – ironing shirts, shopping for groceries, cooking dinner. Plus baking a cake, the first one I’ve made since Christmas – I got a sudden longing for rhubarb cake. I found an Estonian recipe on the web, and it came out just like a rhubarb cake is supposed to be: juicy-soft and sour-sweet. Mmmm.