You know it’s spring when …

By ‘C’ (for Session Leader, who had to “skidaddle” at the end of the morning):

It is warm enough for creatures which had been hibernating, to venture out …

One ‘Slow Worm’ (actually a limbless lizard: Anguis fragilis) being admired this morning
before being put back in a Good Place

there are thousands of infant trees springing up, only to be systematically uprooted, because they are in the Wrong Place …

“Where have all these come from?”
– “From a sycamore tree.”

and ‘C’ swaps woolly hat for the sub-French-Foreign-Legion look:

Le képi blanc – c'est pas ça!

If the animals which live beside the River Thames experience the prompting to do a bit of spring-cleaning plus “divine discontent and longing” at the start of The Wind in the Willows, Green-Gymmers on a visit to a site beside the same river, further upstream from where Kenneth Grahame’s classic is set, were looking forward this morning to a spring-tidy with a difference.  These were some of our targets:

“Those are plants” – to be planted

Redundant planter to be emptied and dismantled

Gate-protection post (which had fulfilled its function!) – to be “replanted”
(and the other one, the other side of the gateway)

One seriously un-riverworthy fibreglass boat – to be smashed

So some of us had literally a smashing time ...

while others worked the soil:

There was still time to spare to carry out some running repairs:

Also to explore the site in search of Loddon Lilies.  Their full glory yet to come, and always hard to capture the full impression of them on film – this is, after all, the largest display of these flowers in the country:

By session end, redundant items were gone …

leaning posts had been re-set, in line with the others …

and we had all had a very satisfying time.  

That the weather had been perfect for us, was no surprise.  As one Green-Gymmer explained, "There  is always a window of good weather on a Tuesday morning.  The Virtue Effect on weather has been seriously under-estimated: where twelve people are gathered with the virtuous intention of Green Gym, there the sun shines."