Snails!  Living under stones and bricks and hedges, in winter glued together in a bumpy mass, how they feed.  On lettuces, seedlings, any soft green leaves until only holes and ribbons or bare stems remain.  They like eating what I like growing. One year we collected scores in a bucket, doused them in salt – oh how they hissed as they expired – rinsed and cooked them with garlic and butter.   They tasted good, but I haven’t cooked them since.  Other times I threw them over the wall into our neighbour’s garden.  Now, I mostly leave them.  I am thrilled when I see the broken snail...

  It’s like returning to a discarded lover who stayed faithful through all those years.  I was just bored with you.  You were so damn flowery.  Decades ago, I was told to spray you with chemicals to stop the mildew, blackspot, you name it, ‘to keep them clean’.  I never did.  But now I see you once more and find that in fact you have such variety you are never boring.  The east wall is papered with Pink Perpetue whose petals neatly fall, and Zephirine Drouhine, garish girly pink but scented, and another red.  They were here when we came.  They get black spot, like beautiful...

Upstairs!  It’s from here my cottage has the best views.  This is where I see our village, roof rectangles, squares and triangles framed by the rounded shapes of trees.  Masculine and feminine.  Cezanne could have painted it.  Come to think of it, reception rooms of all the grand old houses (try Hampton Court)  are on the first floor. Also, it’s only from here, that some of my May beauties are visible.  The white climbing rose Mrs Herbert Stevens (did I plant it because Granny was Mrs Horace Stephens?) along the fence at ground level peers at next doors dustbins, but from here...

Years ago Jessica found this lovely thing in her garden and asked me what it was.  I hadn’t a clue, but eventually we found it’s from Peru, Nicandra physalodes, named after a Greek poet Nicander.   Web pictures show small blooms a pallid mauve shade among a mass of dull green foliage.  In America they wrote, ‘scrawny flowers and not very striking,’ and ‘do not think of cultivating this horrible invasive!!’   We felt outraged!  Nicandra belongs to the nightshade family, and its other names are Apple of Peru and the Shoo-Fly plant.  Whether it actually shoos flies away I very much...

December 15th, and we haven’t even got to the shortest day.  The screen of summer has gone, and the planks of the fence are revealed, dull and bare.  The leaves on the ground are no longer crisp and russet but brown slimy sheets barely distinguishable from the dog’s hard turds which I flick into the flower beds, full of stems felled by the massacre of winter.  The green man looks miserable – stifled by ivy he can scarcely breathe.  My fingers in  stout gloves are so cold they can do nothing.   It’s going to be like this for months.  The garden writers talk about flowers and veg and...