Easter has passed by in a blaze of splendid warmth. (Not so warm today, as I found out standing about in the soon-to-be-garden of my clients out by the sea. There was a bitter wind blowing off the Med.) Leaves that were tiny tight buddy things when we got up to CdP on Easter Saturday were open and large-ish by the time I left on Wednesday.

I love the soft, pale grey-green of the service tree; it didn’t look very happy there by the front door last year – perhaps because of never-quite-enough-water – but the foliage it’s sending out now doesn’t seem to bear any ill-will. The twisted old cherry trees by the car park are a haze of white petals, with the lilac struggling into flower beside them. It looks like the lilac has fully recovered from its two years of having a crane sitting on top of it and cascades of quicklime pouring over its branches. Even the tiny lilac twigs I stuck back into the ground here and there when the crane was removed have buds on them; it’s wondrous what nature can survive.

It’s wondrous, too, what nature plants to surprise you. The verbascum that comes up again and again against the wall of the chicken house is a glorious velvety lesson in perfect symmetry once more; the inexplicable iris leaves that have been appearing at the top of my yellow rose bank for the past two years without ever producing anything but stubby strap leaves have burst into regal purple flower. (Where did they come from, those irises? Can they be some of those bulbs I planted an age ago, before we started building, under the big oak tree? Has soil from there somehow found its way into my rose bank, bulbs included? Or was that bulb moved there by the same mysterious agent that transported one of my ridiculous, messy-topped eye-popping red tulips from the Rosa felicia bank to the white-rose bank where only thin, delicate blue irises should be?)

I think that as I meditated on the need for perfect isolation for raised-bed building last month, L must have been mulling over the wisdom of leaving me up to my own (self-indulgent) devices, because he did, and I got down to work. As I said, they’re not anything that your master carpenter would be proud of. But my raised beds work. Well, one works. Of the planned six, only three have been constructed (my Easter target) and one has swiftly become a compost bin (nothing like composting sur place to save you lumping the stuff around, further down the road). One has yet to be filled with soil and ready-made compost. And the other, by now, probably holds the twisted, shriveled-up remains of the little peas and beans and courgettes that I raised so lovingly on the balcony here in Rome. Because despite a forecast – at one point – of rain just after the Easter weekend, not a drop has fallen since well before Easter and certainly none since I put my poor little seedlings into their picturesque bed. Tomorrow I will dash up there for a little watering-system installing. But (1) that will probably work like an Aborigine rain dance and (2) I fear it may be too late already. Still, it will be needed for the rest of the summer. And I can always abandon my worthy, veggie--fundamentalist plans and pick up some more plantlets at the market next Saturday. Not, alas, my organic ones, from organic seeds… but not dead either, which is a big advantage.

At one point over that long Easter weekend, L looked around him and said – strangely, considering his usual hypercritical attitude – “it’s amazing, all things considered, how well-kept bits of this garden are looking” and he’s right. It’s my dream of ‘establishment’ coming true.

Of course, anyone without my happy relationship with things that are, basically, weeds, might not be wholly pleased with my over-long daisy-packed lawn; but walking through it with bare feet on a warm spring morning gives me infinitely more pleasure even than skimming over it barefoot when it is freshly cut and groomed. And again, anyone without my weed-tolerance might be fighting slightly harder against the invasion of baby wild poppy plants that’s taking place in my flower beds, but I can’t quite bring myself to yank them up: even before they flower I can see them with fireflies darting through them on hot and drowsy early-summer nights.

What’s more, I fear that perhaps the neatness of immediately around the house is set off to advantage by the chaos that reigns everywhere else: I mean, after the jungle you pass through to get there, you can’t quite believe that this little corner of pseudo-order can really exist. The past few weeks of focussing (or not) on the vegetable garden really haven’t done the rest of the place any good at all. I had one of our Easter guests out being useful, weeding between the artichoke plants that have all but disappeared beneath a sea of weeds along the front drive… but there’s only so much you can ask of people who consider themselves to be on holiday. My front-hedge roses are totally hidden from view. I haven’t bothered to get any manure delivered to feed and mulch anything (though I did suggest to Giuseppe the Bulldozer Boy, when he called to ask me the number of my useful bulk manure-supplier, that he might like to off-load a bit of his cargo at our place if he felt like it). And I haven’t filled in the huge holes gauged in the lawn – very near the house I might add – by wild boars who definitely shouldn’t be hungry enough at this prosperous time of year to scratch about in our garden (what are they playing at?).

Wildlife, I’ve noticed, has become rather profuse around us of late. I used to think that decades of having their heads blasted off by weekend ‘sportsmen’ had lowered the animal population to un-replaceable levels – or at least persuaded them to migrate elsewhere. But now I’m not so sure. The pheasants around us have that look about them that says they know that the hunting season is over and they’re smug about having survived it: there’s a hen who struts about on the lawn in front of the chicken house in a very proprietorial way. The whole place is pullulating with woodpeckers (some of whom have stripped the wood under the eaves quite bare on the eastern side of our house, the rats). Cuckoos were doing their chant very loudly all weekend down in the woods. And when I looked out of L’s study window the other day, two little foxes were chasing each other up and down the terraces. Now, all the others I’ve seen/heard before. But foxes – now that was something quite quite new. And though I only spotted them that once, I’m feeling very proud indeed of my foxes.