On a rare day of sunshine, bumblebees seek rosemary’s blue flowers, and a brimstone flits across bright green leaves of poisonous monkshood and the day lilies, nibbled by rabbits. Startling is the increase in the sun’s warmth and height; a tracery of tree shadows is cast across the southern slope, and the old magnolia, recently pruned by the local tree surgeon of a large mossy branch split by the winter gales, is thick with purple-flushed goblets of light. Later, in a dramatic orange sky, the sun sets almost due west, beyond the clothes line, out of use throughout the wet months.