CHAPTER THREE The Others Birds Birds are free as we can never be.  They soar the sky.  They blithely cross garden fences, barbed wire, prison walls, national borders and oceans.  We need birds to remind us of a liberty which, except in the mind, we have never had.  We need the dawn chorus in spring, the jabber of jackdaws, the whole orchestra of the garden. I write this having just returned from Egypt, where on ancient temples and inside tombs all manner of birds are painted and sculpted.  They are mostly gods.  Horus a sky god is a hawk, Thoth, writer and recorder, is an ibis, while the goddess...

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...

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,...

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...

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...