Still Very Wet, Yet Spring Approaching

This January was one of the wettest in the past 100 years; I have read such articles in the various mass medias.  Every day someone is reporting about the bad weather, disasters such as flooding, high tide and storm...

Now it is in the second half of February, and the rain fall has been still going on.  I caught a few sunny hours last week for a walk last week.

The buds of English Oak on the field were caught by my eyes.  The red bronzy buds in the blue sky pleased me.

But, as I walked to the edge of a woodland, there were streams everywhere, from higher to lower level.  The footpath, pictured above, became a stream, in which the clear water was streaming and it would be wonderful if it had been a real stream.  But it was to be a footpath. Wearing a pair of sturdy wellies was reasonable.

I walked in an oak and beech rich woodland.  There I walked a lot, and yet didn't notice the oak trees were actually downy oak until I saw the fallen leaves on the footpath.  I sadly witnessed several big fallen trees there.  Presumably they could not keep their trunks against the gust of wind and could not keep their roots in the loose ground wetted by the enormous rain fall.

At the edge of the woodland there is a long row of beech trees.  In the summer it is like a green alley.  In the early summer there transforms into a fairytale-like scene with the white flower of wild garlic.  I walked into the beech land.

There!  The shiny young wild garlic leaves were sprouting out from the ground between the fallen beech leaves and twigs.

On a beech stump these fungi were thriving in the winter.

I saw bunch of snowdrop on the sunny slope of a farmhouse at the end of the beech alley.

At a side of the footpath, protected from wind and cold, I found tiny cream white primrose. 

This winter has been wet but mild, which wake the plants up much earlier than usual, I suppose.  Today the temperature has gone up over 10 Celsius (actually, thermometer showed 12 Celsius!).  The plants cannot keep their dormancy (I didn't know this word; the slow metabolism) in the warm winter and the early visit of the spring!