Let’s travel back in time three hundred years or more, to the East End Farm, near the hamlet of Nowhere.
East End farm has a few sheep and goats, some vegetables and several apple orchards.
Tonight the orchards are surrounded by farm workers and villagers from Nowhere, all singing and banging pots and pans. Children hang pieces of toast soaked in cider from the tree branches.
For tonight, January 5th, is the wassail, the twelfth night of Christmas.
Apples grow all across the county of Somerset, and are especially important to Nowhere and its bigger neighbour, Nailsea. Every farm brews cider, which they give to the farm hands as part of their wages.
(Centuries later, cider would be brewed and sold in large factories. Nailsea hosted Coates factory for over 150 years. These days, the Thatcher family brews cider at Sandford, ten miles to the southwest.)
Back in Nowhere, apple trees are a sign of a healthy farm. Wise famers celebrate the good health of their orchards with a wassail.
Their people visit the apple trees by the light of burning torches. Singing songs to them and making a lot of noise to ward off evil spirits. Hopefully, this should be enough to ensure a good harvest in the next year.
The oldest tree in the orchard is given the greatest respect, and he is called the ‘Apple Tree Man’.
The Apple Tree Man decides how many apples will grow in the next year. Farmers keep the Apple tree Man happy by pouring cider over his roots.
There are several old folk tales told in Somerset about the Apple Tree Man. The next story is a modern retelling of one of these old tales.
This willow tree in the park is very old. Maybe a hundred years or so. Look how its bark is gnarled and twisted. It is a great friend of the park and is home to many different insects and birds. One year, a female mallard duck even made a nest on the flat top of the tree!
It’s January 1st and the floor of the wood is covered with fresh new leaves, growing in dense patches. The first flowers are starting to open. Within a week, the air is scented with a sweet fragrance. This is the winter heliotrope, which is just as much at home in Nowhere as it is in its native North Africa.
The winter heliotrope is unusual because it has separate male and female plants. As far as we know, the Victorian gardeners only imported male plants into Britain, because they liked the showy flowers and its rich scent. So, although the flowers make good 
Every year, the snowdrop is the first plant to flower in Nowhere Wood. It is a symbol of the birth of Spring, bringing good cheer and hope at the end of a long winter. This is one reason why people plant snowdrops in their gardens.
Snowdrops are tougher than they look: they can grow through ice and snow. Their leaves have hardened edges that act as snowploughs and their cells contain a snowdrop antifreeze that stops ice crystals forming. The real secret of the snowdrop’s success is found below the ground, in the frozen soil. There, in the darkness, is a bulb, full of food made in last Spring’s photosynthesis. Like a battery, it is an energy store, so that the plant can start to grow in the weak winter sunshine.
This means that the plant can make leaves to grow in the warming Sun. The leaves make food to store in its bulbs ready for next year. Snowdrops do all of this before the leaves of the big trees open to steal the light, so that the floor of the wood becomes shaded. By then, the work of the snowdrop is over and it can wait for the next winter.