When I was young Christmas was, well – it was Christmas! The closer it came the more excited I got. I just couldn’t wait. As a small child tucked up in bed, wriggly with excitement and too excited to sleep, the anticipation of Christmas was about as exciting as things could get.

Decades pass, that anticipation hasn’t so much faded as moved to what feels like another season of gift-giving – Spring.

This time of year, watching the bulb tips emerge, the buds start to swell, seeing the early iris and clematis bloom, their colours so vivid in a landscape of brown twigs and cold earth, it feels like a kind of Christmas and every green shoot, every bud, is a present. Once again, I’m impatient, I can’t wait. I’m out in the garden every day, looking. Waiting.

Watching the sun-line creep down a frosty hedge.

One thing I didn’t properly learn as that young child was that wanting something doesn’t make it come any faster. Christmas still came on Christmas Day. Spring also makes me realise that many things come when they’re good and ready, and that there is also actually a great deal going on in these cold dark months. It’s there if you know where, and how, to look.

Even so, I can’t wait.