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...

  GARDEN SKY    My friend Jane, de-cluttering her garden, has given me a rocking lounger.  I lie and look at the sky.  English sky is more subtle than the unvarying  blue  of Mediterranean sky.  It changes, it moves, it’s moody, it’s quicksilver.    In the grey clouds I see pink, mauve, yellow and green.  Sometimes the sky sulks, it’s just rolls of steel scouring wool.  Sometimes it’s a clean mottled blue. Marble.  Those clouds move with such purpose.  They know where they are going, what they are going to do.  I can see mythological creatures up there, the centaurs, gods...

EMPTINESS  Leaves lie on the grass, the patio, the steps and path, and huddle by the dustbins and the corners of the porch.  Crisp at first. then torn and dull, and slimy.  Mrs Leader from the fence below comes complaining our birch tree is taking their sun and its leaves are rotting her decking.  Tough!  It was there before her house was built.  But it’s grown, can’t we lop it?  No.  She speaks of the dangers of birches, and of their fumes (never heard this one before).  She is flying to her house in Portugal tomorrow, and will be back in April with a tree surgeon (tree butcher) to cut...

  It is night in my garden.  This is what it’s like to be blind.   Unrelieved darkness.  The place is full of strangers.  A vandal tears up newly planted seedlings.  Another tears leaves into shreds.    A cat yowls.  Something rustles.  Something scrapes, then patters.  A rat?   The place is weird, awkward.  Alien.  I cannot see, I trip and fall.  Night is not where we belong.   Clouds part to reveal the moon behind the trees.  I can see slightly more.  It’s mysterious, more beautiful than at high summer.  In the morning I see silver paths meandering over...

Henry’s Lily, or Lilium henryi  I am devoted to this lily.  The flowers bloom in a cascade and sway in the breeze like a flaming corps de ballet.   This enchanting creature has thirty or so blooms on a single stem, and comes up every year without fail.  Like all good flowers, it looks great from a distance, as well as bearing intimate inspection.  Each bloom is covered with pimples called papillae, and its delicate orange shade turns to green at the throat.  What is the purpose of these whiskery papillae?  Maybe to intrigue insects as much as me.  We have minute papillae on the...