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...

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...

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...

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...

Due to the pandemic, poor old Chelsea Flower Show was switched from its usual May to late September.  Dull!  All these show gardens in drab greens, as though sprayed with a wash of grey, plus the usual unrealistic plashing waterfall here and there.  Why not a flaming forest of dahlias? Better I thought were the balcony gardens, where you would lounge in your eyrie way above the crowds.  Also I liked the container gardens which could travel with your every change of  house – pots, tins, barrels and the like  painted and planted with herbs, bulbs, little shrubs.  The Pop Street garden had red,...