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...
Posted by sarah in Garden Blog, Uncategorized
on October 5th, 2021 | Comments Off on POST MORTEM: CHELSEA 2021
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,...
Posted by sarah in Garden Blog, Uncategorized
on September 20th, 2021 | Comments Off on 2. GARDENING FOR EVER – Happiness? Health? Environment
Happiness? Health?
The concept of happiness as a steady achievable state of being is comparatively modern (look at those meek medieval madonnas, dour Dutch citizens, proud Renaissance magnates,). Aristotle understood the search for happiness but later it was neither particularly sought or admired, particularly by religions, which state that suffering is humanity’s daily fare. Then came the eighteenth century and the US declaration that all men have a right to the pursuit of happiness, and Alexander Pope declaring ‘Oh Happiness, our being’s end and aim!’
Today books, CDs, lectures, and...
Posted by sarah in Garden Blog, Uncategorized
on September 20th, 2021 | Comments Off on 1. GARDENING FOR EVER. Why Garden?
PREFACE
When the Hampshire Magazine, for which I wrote a garden column for over thirty years, folded, I spent a few years writing a book about the history of gardening which (amazingly, to me) was accepted and published by In the Garden Publishing (ITG) in the USA. Fine, and it sold quite well. Then ITG too folded.
Then, I gradually wrote a book about easy gardening – I mean gardening that’s not onerous and doesn’t take too long. In it I touched on the fact – which I had never been able to discuss in the highly practical and factual Hampshire Magazine – that...