WHEN does spring send out its advance party, advising us the days will soon be warmer and brighter again? Is it when the mistle thrush in the bare poplars casts his tuneful phrases across woodland and water, as we break into the New Year? Or when the scillas and daffodils push tentatively out of the earth?
For Susanna Bott, chatelaine of Benington Lordship, the promise of spring arrives with the downy clouds of February snowdrops that cover the ground around the remains of a Norman castle and its next-door church, close to her early-18th-century home.
‘On a sunny day in February, the scent of honey
