BIG, handsome birds - green woodpeckers, collared doves -bounce around. The wind is sharp, and there is water, water everywhere. It glitters over the pastures, and makes the thinnest of March ice. Passiontide is inescapable. Passiontide, with its painful, yet sumptuous, hymns and sadness.

The old garden buds. Dressed in two jerseys and a gentlemanly cap, I set to. There is much to do: dead sticks to rake up, edging to sharpen the beds, leaves to rot elsewhere. The white cat says: "More fool you," and goes back to sleep. At night, in the spring darkness, a climbing rose taps the pane like Heathcliff. It joins in the Beethoven, and measures out the silences.

Richard Mabey arrives. We are old, old friends, from way back, and can sit without words, if need be. But we talk, of course. He is to give an official lecture at Essex University, after which there will be a banquet, and I shall take in a sea of young faces, and an ocean of hopes. Towards the end, I will once again be witnessing hundreds of beginnings.

Once, taking a seminar, and not knowing how to fill in the time, and in a room filled with a dozen nationalities, I asked my students to read to me in their own lang-uages. A French girl read Baudelaire at breakneck speed, and a Jewish girl read Genesis in Hebrew. A Japanese student read - what? His words were like the tinkling of glass.

I read them a short story. A local boy read some of his first novel. There was no judgement, only a hearing. My main instruction was to slow them down. Slowing down matins and evensong is an art. Creating spaces. Have I fainted, or fallen asleep? But how I love the familiar voices! And where the lectionary passage does not make sense to the reader, I might let them go on. Such is the nerve of a writer.

Passiontide, and we listen to, among so many other things, Hebrews. We do not know who wrote it, or to whom it was addressed. Christ is the "effulgence of God's glory", and our high priest.

When the youthful John Bunyan went mad, believing that he had committed an unforgivable sin, his sensible wife turned to Hebrews and read to him: "Remember where you stand, not before the palpable, blazing fire of Sinai, with the darkness, gloom, and whirlwind, the trumpet blast and oracular voice. . . No, you stand before the city of the living God, heavenly Jerusalem . . . the spirits of good men made perfect, and Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, whose sprinkled blood has better things to tell than the blood of Abel."

It was this passage that freed Bunyan from religious hysteria, and made him a rational Christian teacher, not to mention an enchanting author.

I must call on my snowdrops. And on my little daffodils, the ones to which Dorothy Wordsworth drew her brother's attention. I have thousands of snowdrops, and mere hundreds of daffodils, and it is easy to believe that these March flowers will wait for my delight. But they will not. They will - go. Time will take their bloom, if not their roots. Frosts do not touch them, but I feel I must. March will not have been "lived" if I do not.

The author of Hebrews meditates on gardening, but to no very great extent, although the New English editors place this passage under the heading, "The shadow and the real". It is the real that demands my presence today. Raking, tidying - digging, even.