Out here on the forest edge you get these wonderful seasonal mismatches. The blackthorn is still hanging on to its sloes, small and midnight–blue, long after most berries have been stripped. They’re not ignored because they lack value, but because they’re so astringent that most birds only touch them after the frosts have softened them. Their other natural predator, the Sloe Gin maker, knows this too, although these days a night in the freezer is more viable. In fact, thrushes, blackbirds and starlings tend to leave sloes as a kind of winter emergency ration, turning to them only when the sweeter berries of hawthorn and rowan are gone.
Behind them, though, the hazel is already getting on with spring. Catkins dangling in the grey air, loosening and lengthening weeks before most people expect. They always seem hasty to me, determined to beat the crowd and send their pollen into a world that still feels wintry.
So in one frame you get two clocks ticking at their own pace. The sloe, lingering. The hazel, impatient. And the forest reminds you that its calendar is never a single page but thousands, layered and overlapping. It is winter here, yes, but it is also nearly spring if you know where to look.