I used to weed out ones I wasn’t so keen on, the pale pinks, the small flowered ones, they’re insipid I said, but now (age, my age!) I let them be, and they have affairs and breed, and this moment it’s a ball – girlish colours, pale yellow with magnificent spurs, powder blue and white, pink, pink and white beside dark macho blues.  They sway together, bending and kissing.  Promiscuous is the  word botanists use about flowers like these, condemning their glorious open handed love. How they love this chalky soil, dry but fertile, and spring up all over the place. I bought...

What I like about containers is that when the rest of the garden looks tired or in a mess, I have my containers under control – weeded and watered, even in late August, but at the same time sporting a wild, exuberant look. So, I’ve been planting up the four large stone bowls on the patio.  I love doing it,  I love the feel of the compost,  weedless and stoneless, as I add jelly granules to hold water and slow release fertilizer (‘wear gloves’ say instructions – what rubbish).  It’s like sifting flour. The only trouble about newly planted pots is that they...

Jane, who lives across the yard from me, has the tiniest slit of a garden border which currently sports the earliest and best yellow rose of all, Canary Bird. I’ve never grown it, because I haven’t room for something large and rangy which it normally is, sending out great spurs which reach seven feet.  But with her Canary Bird, Jane clips it in due course so tightly that when it blooms it’s just a ball of golden flowers. Slight scent when the sun is on it, which in Bay Tree Yard is only half the day.  It usually flowers again in August or so, and its ferny leaves are so fine...

The place is awash with tulips.  And to think I used to think them vulgar, gaudy, like plastic beakers for a children’s picnic, not my thing at all because I was too shy and introverted.  But these sing and dance and do the cancan, and all I can do is take hands and join in, and laugh. They’re mostly Apeldoorn varieties, plain Apeldoorn, Golden Apeldoorn and Apeldoorn Elite, because these are mostly perennial, coming up year after year.  The fiery colours mix well. (One year I had in nearby pots some purple ones, which looked most disapproving. It might have worked if I’d mixed...

April 1st.  The trees boom in the wind –something is happening up there. I was reading The Lord’s Army, about the army of children in Uganda who murder, burn and steal as best they can.  They are organised  by a man named Kony, who believes he is God.  Spirits are everywhere – and Kony is possessed by a murderous spirit.  But, though the book is about this evil in a corner of Uganda, I keep glimpsing beyond in the rest of Uganda and in Africa a glorious animism .  Everything is alive with spirits, and the churches are full, and a woman jumps up and laughs, such is her joy in the Lord....