Life, the Universe and Gardening explores the reasons why we garden.  When we garden we use all our senses, sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste, and our intuition too.  We find and create new patterns and new colours.  We meet animals varying from insects to singing birds, mice and hedgehogs, as well as foxes and grey squirrels, and we learn to understand and love – or tolerate at the least – them all.  We see mathematical patterns in flower shapes and leaves, we learn that every living thing emerges and has its span of glory.  We meet death as well as life.  We join nature to...

It’s March, and the weeping cherry at the end of the yard is blooming.  If I step through the weeping boughs when the sun is out, it’s like being dressed in palest pink glass.  Even though the tree is old and odd boughs have died, it still draws people into our...

2020 Jan to Feb. EGYPT BLOG Egypt keeps calling.  We want to go to Luxor. But, return flights to Luxor are about £750.  So, we got return flights to Hurghada, diving resort on the Red Sea, for about £240.  Because Bob’s walking is poor, I asked for Assistance going through Gatwick, normally the most horrid airport around, with spiteful sadistic Security.  Assistance was bliss – ah the luxury of being treated as a sweet harmless imbecile – Security so gentle, and then a large area with padded chairs where we sat until called, and then carried on a buggy outside which dodged round...

No one knows where Dungeness is. Bill thought it was near Aldeburgh and Rosie Sturgis in Wales. It’s a high spur of shingle deposited by floods in Kent when a frozen North Sea thawed after the last Ice Age and flooding the vast plain of Doggerland pushed through the Channel. Ann and I found we were both reading Derek Jarman’s Journals, and had to visit his garden in the shingle of Dungeness. Jarman started the garden when he was already dying of Aids but it took more than four years to kill him. He bought this black wooden fisherman’s cottage, and among the surrounding shingle set about...

The Hive is the big excitement. Kew Gardens have bee hives, and their sound is amplified through a construction of metal network, a huge mound of interlacing silvery hexagons. The varying sounds indicate begging for a food sample, pointing to food supplies, ‘tooting’ and ‘quarking’, but you hear not so much a buzz as a throb and hum: live music and the sound of heaven. Perfect for meditation. At ground level we looked up and saw the feet of people through a circle of murky glass, then we climbed and entered the centre of this hive.   Feeling the throb inside us, looking up...