Greetings from a garden full of Spring promise! After an absence of several weeks, I recently left winter dormancy behind and have been welcomed by the optimism of spring from the Garden.

The productive work carried out by Larissa, Naomi and our wonderful volunteers these past few weeks is evident from the signs of coppicing, pollarding, pruning and propagating, as well as thinning out some of our most determined umbellifers - cow parsley, hogweed and ground elder.

Coppiced alder (Alnus glutinosa)

© Derek Adams

Seed propagation in preparation for our Spring Wildlife Event on Saturday 5 April

© Sue Snell

And the garden itself has a surprise around every corner. On the ground in the coppiced woodland habitat and beneath the mature lime, the daffodils (Narcissus pseudonarcissus) are in bloom.

The first of our native daffodils was recorded on 25 February nine days earlier than last year

© Jonathan Jackson

There's a fair sprinkling of primroses (Primula vulgaris) in flower, with many more buds yet to open.

Primroses at the edge of woodland - first flower recorded on 18 February; just a couple of days earlier than last year

© Jonathan Jackson

A deeper shade of yellow is offered by the fluffy heads of coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara) which brighten up the hedge banks.

Coltsfoot, a plant typical of waste areas but welcome in our garden

© Derek Adams

Red dead-nettle (Lamium purpureum) along the path provides nectar for early flying insects, and other shades of pink include the occasional red campion (Silene dioica) and herb robert (Geranium robertianum).

Red campion thrives in our Wildlife garden -  at least one plant can be seen in flower throughout the year

© Derek Adams

Sweet violet (Viola odorata) is in flower between hedge and pond and dog's mercury (Mercurialis perennis) is increasing its territory beneath silver birch and ash. We'll be contributing our first flower and animal sightings to the Woodland Trust's Nature's Calendar.

Dog's mercury (Mercurialis perennis) - first flower this year was recorded on 13th January

© Jonathan Jackson

But what is most striking is the volume of bird song this week! After crossing the threshold of the Garden the traffic noise of Cromwell Road melts away and a symphony takes over inlcuding the medodic song of blackbirds and robins, rich trills and 'Tshews' from a flock of greenfinches, a medley of calls from blue, great and long-tailed tits, the occasional sound from our moorhen couple, and more.

There are flashes of red and yellow from goldfinches, and blue and yellow as blue tits whirr across our pathways. Territories are being established, courtship is in progress - and in some cases nesting material is already being transported to niches within ivy-clad trees:

A female blackbird was observed building a nest in ivy this week but here the male is feeding up on ivy berries

The supply of rowan berries referred to in recent blogs is finally exhausted!

© Jonathan Jackson

And to nest boxes, and the eaves of our garden shed:

A wren started building here this week, the site was then taken over by a robin and now is currently vacant...

© Larissa Cooper

But not to hedges where there is too little camouflage just yet:

Catkins amongst the bare branches of one of our laid hedges

© Jonathan Jackson

Hazel catkins broke hedge dormancy in early January and now white flowers appear on the bare branches of blackthorn (Prunus spinosa).

Our first blackthorn flowers opened on 18 February

© Jonathan Jackson

This is our earliest flowering native shrub in the Wildlife Garden (and elsewhere). Clouds of white blossom are already visible in hedges in the countryside. One of the many country sayings relating to Blackthorn is that its flowering is said to coincide with a cold spell - but not this week. More blackthorn country sayings and uses can be found on Roy Vickery's website of Plantlore.

Blackthorn is a spikier relative of hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) - and an excellent hedge companion, quick growing and providing good nest sites amongst a network of spiny branches and thorns. And, in autumn, sloes are food for berry-eating birds.

But this shrub and hedgerow plant is beneficial to many other species: providing nectar for early flying insects such as the tree bumble bee (Bombus hypnorum), first sighted in the garden this year on 15 February; and buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) observed on 6 March.

It's one of the larval food plants for many beautiful moth species including sloe midget (Phyllonorycter spinicolella), tufted button (Acleris cristana), clouded silver (Lomographa temerata) and the brimstone moth (Opisthograptis luteolata), all of which have been recorded here. You can read more about moth recording in the Wildlife Garden, by Lepidopterist Martin Honey in the Spring issue of evolve - the Museum's quarterly magazine.

Brimstone Moth - this particular specimen was caught in our light trap on 6 August and released the following morning

© Florin Feneru

This week also we were shown the concept plans for the redesign of the Museum grounds, some of which included some surprising suggestions for the Wildlife Garden - you can read about this competition at Malcolm Reading Consultants.

Its been a fine Spring week but March is a capricious month and country sayings about the blackthorn weather may yet ring true.

Coltsfoot (again)

© Derek Adams

In the meantime we intend to hold on to our Spring optimism in the Museum's Wildlife Garden and continue to promote and conserve biodiversity here in the heart of London.

As autumn approaches and the new academic year begins so we lose Thomas Fieldsend, or Tommy as we know him, who enters the final year of his studies for a BSc in Animal Conservation & Biodiversity at Hadlow College. In common with many students, Tommy came to volunteer with us for work experience while studying for the first two years of his degree course. He covered a wide variety of practical and survey work as (hopefully) the images below will show! We will greatly miss his input, and his company. Here he describes his time in the Wildlife Garden:

"As a young boy growing up outside of London, a trip to the Museum was a rare treat. So, as I began the first day of my two-year work placement here in November 2011, I couldn’t help but wonder what my younger self would have made of it all. I’m sure he would have been excited; I know my 22 year old self was! I was about to become initiated into the world of the ‘Wildlife Garden Volunteer’, and I wasn’t sure quite what to expect. As it turns out, the only thing I ever came to expect in the Garden was the unexpected.

November 2011 in the Wildlife Garden

Although a ‘can do’ attitude may be considered a prerequisite for a Wildlife Garden Volunteer, an ‘I’ll give it a go’ attitude is probably more beneficial, because when your day’s work might include tree felling, sheep corralling, or calculating the Garden’s amphibian population to the nearest hundred, just ‘giving it a go’ often becomes your best course of action.

Amphibian survey April 2013

So I was very pleased - and somewhat baffled - when I realised that somewhere along the line I had actually become proficient at performing many of the tasks I had once regarded as exercises in damage limitation.

Tommy and Alex learning to navigate while reducing reeds and great willowherb on the moorhen island

Not only that: I realised I had acquired the vocabulary of the Wildlife Garden natives as well as their skills. I found myself using words such as ‘coppicing’, ‘pedunculate’, and ‘pinnate’, without realising I had even learnt them. I had become, unbeknownst to me, a wildlife gardener!

Newly coppiced hazel

Hedge planting with Alex and Naomi

This came as quite a shock, as when I started in the Garden I was a first year Animal Conservation student at Hadlow College who was of the firm belief that he was an 'animal person', not a 'plant person'; that animals and the environment they inhabit could be treated as somehow discrete from one another, even in the context of conservation.

Tommy inspires another young person: making insect hotels during our Spring Wildlife event earlier this year

In actuality, most of the work undertaken in the Wildlife Garden consists of facilitating natural ecosystem functioning through habitat management; in this sense, the Garden can be considered an example of effective conservation in a microcosm. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the importance of approaching habitat management and wildlife conservation holistically is the single most valuable lesson I learnt during my time as a Wildlife Garden Volunteer. But whatever I learnt along the way, I know this much: I had a lot of fun, and I won’t be forgetting the time I was part of the Wildlife Garden Team any time soon!

Tommy, Nadia and Alex at the Brighter Kensington and Chelsea Scheme collecting an award in November 2012

Let me finish by thanking Caroline, Larissa, Naomi, and the whole Wildlife Garden Team for all their help and kindness during my time as a volunteer. Special thanks must go to Alex Lynch for the comic relief."

Hopefully we'll hear or see more of Tommy Fieldsend ...