by Ian Brand MOST mornings from early spring onwards I enjoy ambling around our garden. This usually takes place immediately post-breakfast, with a cup of coffee in hand. It is an exciting time of year, waiting to spot that first bumblebee, butterfly or my favourite harbinger of spring, Lesser Celandine in flower. I am in good company as it was Wordsworth’s favourite too, his poems to this member of the buttercup family outnumbering those to the Daffodil three to one. How exactly we define spring and its arrival is contentious - 1st March for meteorologists and Spring Equinox for astronomers. Most of us, however, associate spring with various natural events: the arrival of migrant birds, finding frogspawn, spring flowers, and the budburst and first leaves of trees.
We asked which iconic Princes Street shops should be brought back - the public answered
scotsman.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from scotsman.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Wharfedale Naturalists Society IS it too late to wish you a very “Happy New Year?” I hope not, since it is the subject of this month’s Nature Notes. Why choose a date seven days after Christmas to start the New Year? Personally, as an observer of the natural world, would the Winter Solstice on 21st December not be a better choice? This is when the sun is directly above the Tropic of Capricorn and we experience our shortest hours of daylight, just 7hrs 35mins, with sunrise at 08.23 and sunset at 15.57, here in Wharfedale. Or better still as a naturalist; nominate a day in the third week of January. Meteorologically speaking it is midway through the winter; we are also statistically likely to be experiencing its worse weather. Fortunately come 21st January we are starting to appreciate the increasing daylight hours, now 8hrs 16mins with the sun setting at 16.27. The start of spring is surely not too far away.
Why The Chronicle is not naming a Winemaker of the Year in 2020
An explainer for our year-end wine coverage, in this week s Drinking with Esther newsletter
FacebookTwitterEmail
Because nothing about 2020 is normal, we decided to change up our year-end wine coverage.
December is usually when we roll out our Winemaker of the Year and Winemakers to Watch packages traditions that preceded my arrival at The Chronicle and that I happily inherited from Jon Bonné, the paper’s previous wine writer. But this December we’re not doing either.
Instead, this week we published a different sort of year-capping project: 12 wines that define 2020. Allow me to explain why.
vimarsana © 2020. All Rights Reserved.