The rubble bank is exactly that: a peculiar, linear, broken brick and excavated, relocated dirt mound at the top of our garden.
Turning Autumn Leaves
The clocks had already circled backwards when I took shelter in the passageway beside the second hand book shop. The windows were not lit against the early night and the heavy, black door was locked by the stillness of the recently emptied, untenanted rooms it now kept. I had intended to purchase a new old […]
A Rainy Intermission
In the pursuit of pretty, there are two kinds of gardener who wilfully apportion several weekend evening hours to hosing down their lawn, in a heavy storm, on the darker side of dusk.
Corner to Corner
The garden as we first viewed it, in the estate agent’s particulars, had two obvious and immediate selling points: its wide open size and its impressive woodland backdrop.
On Journaling and Word Rambling
Personal narratives are something we all construct, even if we choose not to share them. We invent them. Weave them. Like making up reasons for what we did after it’s already happened; as if there were some considered rationale or deliberate reasoning before it was done. Which there probably wasn’t. But we can be very […]
Writing a Rock Garden
It’s approaching three months since I last wrote anything in my gardening journal. Since I last wrote anything at all. The urge or inclination to write is cyclic, like the whorling seasons. And as frustratingly sporadic and reliably unpredictable as bursts of unseasonable weather. The process of writing demands a greater input of concentrated energy […]
Water and Words on a Wet Wednesday
The novelty of alliteration, discovered in childhood (a time that often seems like a million years ago to me now) never really faded. At forty-something I should probably be able to think and write with much greater sophistication than a lazy reliance on such an easy and obvious literary device allows. But I just can’t […]
Betula Bones
The birches arrived a few weeks ago: two Betula albosinensis ‘Fascinations’ and two Betula utilis ‘Jacquemontiis’.
Roots, Fruits, Seeds and Weeds
The last of the early Spring bulbs have gone over now.
Border Pest Patrols
As February gave way to meteorological Spring I felt happily satisfied that I’d managed to get a decent head start on this year’s gardening calendar – my first full horticultural Season in our new garden – by doing a lot of the groundwork over Winter.
