Posted by sarah in Garden Blog, Uncategorized
on November 9th, 2021 | Comments Off on 5. GARDENING FOREVER. About Trees
CHAPTER FOUR
About Trees
Every garden, no matter how small, needs some verticality to break the flatness of two dimensions, and ideally this is a tree. What is it about trees? We relate because we both stand upright, with a trunk supporting our head and limbs. We identify. We can embrace them and feel reciprocal pleasure. The aura of any place, its atmosphere, may be personified in goblins, angels, elves and demons. More visibly, it is felt in the long silent being of trees. The older a tree, the greater its individuality; we can sense the dryad within – is it...
Posted by sarah in Garden Blog, Uncategorized
on November 9th, 2021 | Comments Off on 4 GARDENING FOREVER. The Others
CHAPTER THREE
The Others
Birds
Birds are free as we can never be. They soar the sky. They blithely cross garden fences, barbed wire, prison walls, national borders and oceans. We need birds to remind us of a liberty which, except in the mind, we have never had. We need the dawn chorus in spring, the jabber of jackdaws, the whole orchestra of the garden.
I write this having just returned from Egypt, where on ancient temples and inside tombs all manner of birds are painted and sculpted. They are mostly gods. Horus a sky god is a hawk, Thoth, writer and recorder, is an ibis, while the goddess...
Posted by sarah in Garden Blog, Uncategorized
on November 9th, 2021 | Comments Off on 3. GARDENING FOREVER. Awareness: Sky, Wind, Rain and Night.
3. CHAPTER TWO
Awareness
The Sky
‘The sky is sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together, almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, it reflects what is immortal in us’ wrote John Ruskin. * I would take away the ‘almost’. Victor Hugo wrote, ‘There is one spectacle grander than the sea, and that is the sky.
Look up anywhere any day from any garden, and you see the sky, usually with clouds. Storm clouds, solitary cumulus clouds, or wispy flights of cirrus bearing...
Posted by sarah in Travel Blog
on November 2nd, 2021 | Comments Off on LONDON, SPITALFIELDS
Spitalfields – the name comes not from spittle but from Hospital – St Mary’s Hospital in the in the middle ages. Now it’s the liveliest part of London. It doesn’t have the dead feel of Belgravia, or the cheap tourist vibe of Oxford Street. Here, Brick Lane has Bangladeshi, Korean, Vietnamese, French restaurants, for locals. It has a shop with nothing but varieties of Turkish delight. I meet artist nephew Nick in the nearby market – he says, let’s eat here, but I say no, I’m not sitting on a bench munching a van take-away.
We go to an Indian restaurant. At the end I look at...