What to Grow on Dry, Shady, Chalky Soil. My water garden was a large metal bowl on the patio, and in it grew a miniature water lily, golden grass and one or two other watery things. Then one winter it sprang a leak, and all I was left with was a mud filled bowl. Not that far away was a dull, dry patch, mostly earth and chalk lumps, where grass would hardly grow, overhung by shrubby things screening a fence. Suddenly it dawned. Of course, fernery. I placed the bowl in the middle of this patch, filled it with earth, and planted it with miniature harts tongue ferns from Hilliers. Around it I planted a...

  Why do people claim there’s no colour when there’s every shade of green around?  Just look!  True, there’s less variety – the buttercup leaves of Gleditsia triacanthos are now greened up with chlorophyll, and the golden Sambucus is mottled like a snakeskin, and the pale felted leaves of my whitebeam curl brown at the edges, but the others!  The Sophora (the Chinese Scholar’s Tree – love that name) is still a dainty umbrella of lozenges, and the marbled leaves of the cyclamen Neapolitan spread in little fringed circles under the trees beneath pink and white flowers. Beneath its...

Snails!  Living under stones and bricks and hedges, in winter glued together in a bumpy mass, how they feed.  On lettuces, seedlings, any soft green leaves until only holes and ribbons or bare stems remain.  They like eating what I like growing. One year we collected scores in a bucket, doused them in salt – oh how they hissed as they expired – rinsed and cooked them with garlic and butter.   They tasted good, but I haven’t cooked them since.  Other times I threw them over the wall into our neighbour’s garden.  Now, I mostly leave them.  I am thrilled when I see the broken snail...

  It’s like returning to a discarded lover who stayed faithful through all those years.  I was just bored with you.  You were so damn flowery.  Decades ago, I was told to spray you with chemicals to stop the mildew, blackspot, you name it, ‘to keep them clean’.  I never did.  But now I see you once more and find that in fact you have such variety you are never boring.  The east wall is papered with Pink Perpetue whose petals neatly fall, and Zephirine Drouhine, garish girly pink but scented, and another red.  They were here when we came.  They get black spot, like beautiful...

Upstairs!  It’s from here my cottage has the best views.  This is where I see our village, roof rectangles, squares and triangles framed by the rounded shapes of trees.  Masculine and feminine.  Cezanne could have painted it.  Come to think of it, reception rooms of all the grand old houses (try Hampton Court)  are on the first floor. Also, it’s only from here, that some of my May beauties are visible.  The white climbing rose Mrs Herbert Stevens (did I plant it because Granny was Mrs Horace Stephens?) along the fence at ground level peers at next doors dustbins, but from here...