I think that`s the lot now, since I heard the cuckoo from the bottom of the garden tonight. The swallows are in and out of the barns, the housemartins have started putting their intricate nests under the stable roof and this afternoon some swifts were soaring in the sky above the cherry orchard. Which brings me to the cherry orchard.

There is around a week of good days building up to the full glory but this year the week has been wet and grey. Until today. Today has been the perfect cherry orchard day but tonight is the perfect night and the night in our cherry orchard is something else.  It is dusk. The barn owl has just left to skim between the trees. I have walked slowly up to the top of the orchard, where my thinking bench is. The dog and the kittens came too, leaping excitedly through the grass.The bench looks down one of the rides and there I sat, as it darkened and the air cooled, looking down through the amazing trees, clotted with white blossom, bending under the weight of it. It is double cherry  variety so there is double blossom.  A deer ambled by as I sat, sensed the dog, and fled, its heels making a soft thudding through the grass.

I thought that if I was at the pearly gates and had to say what I had done to justify my existence, it would be 'I planted an orchard of 450 cherry trees.'

I drifted back down through the avenues of ghosts realising that today, everything has come back home, as it always, always does.

Oh, and to save you the trouble of looking it up, here it is, the Housman poem I always say to myself on this night, sitting on my thinking bench high up at the top of the orchard.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,	5
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,	10
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.