It’s my plant of the summer, August 2013 It’s a red leaved banana, green leaves with red stems and herring bone veins, glossy, impossibly imposing, its central shoot scrolled into a beetroot spike before loosening into a funnel then relaxing into leaves beneath another shoot.   Everyone says how splendid, and then, when’s it going to flower?  Which it won’t, it’ll be dead long before it has a chance to consider this.  It’s enough that now, every day, it is here, revealing a fresh leaf and spike every few days.  The sun shines through the leaves in late afternoon, making it...

    This is the goddess of my garden.  She oversees all, winter and summer, the blue anemones below her in spring, the birds and snails, the falling leaves, the depredations of winter.  In summer you can hardly see her peering out from the dogwood which has grown around her.  She keeps the garden in order.  She gives and she takes.  Her smile is the careful smile of a Victorian lady.  She watches over the snow, the slush, the winter nights, the stars, the straw yellow lawn of summer.  The dog, the children, the silence, the birds.  She’s my garden spirit.  She’s terracotta, and...

We are driven through the dusty town peopled only by men, all the women having been killed, imprisoned, driven away, to the Nile Palace, where all receptionists, cleaners, boutique owners, waiters and cooks are men.  The sense of loneliness, being a woman visitor in a Muslim country.   On the Nile terrace we drink, while the dusty mauve air turns dark Prussian blue.  My ears are deaf from the plane and my tumour, my eyes are sore and ache, I feel I am receding from everything around me as life becomes fainter, less palpable.  I slowly die, disintegrate back into dust.   The Nubian restaurant is...

 Better No Plants than Sick Plants! Eighteen months ago box blight descended.  Either side the path I had low rows of dwarf box, Buxus suffruticosa, and beautiful they looked too.  Then in the cold damp summer my bright green box turned dull brown.  They became two rivers of death. Box blight attacks box leaves and stems and is caused by two fungi specific to box.  Dwarf box is particularly vulnerable, but the common box, Buxus sempervivens, is more resistant, and my topiary balls of ordinary box emerged virtually unscathed.  The blight is spread by wind and rain.  It has plagued the whole...

LUXOR. Our 7th visit. Luxor Temple, not crowded because the tourists have flown.  A stall offers free booklets on Why Islam is the Tolerant Religion and Why Allah is God of All, and Bob picks up one for his friend Colin Gilbert, a creationist.  The Avenue of sphinxes, the towering pylons with slots for flag poles, the temple of the sacred barque, the hypostyle hall, Alexander the Great’s additions, the nubile breasts of Ramasses II’s daughter who reaches to his knee, a carving of the cow goddess Hathor and, lines of oblong indentations in the walls where people scraped dust for unknown holy...