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...
> MOREIt’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...
> MOREUpstairs! 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...
> MOREYears 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...
> MOREDecember 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...
> MOREGARDEN 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...
> MOREEMPTINESS 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...
> MOREIt 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...
> MOREHenry’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...
> MOREIt’s my plant of the summer, August 2013 It’s a red leaved banana, green leaves with red stems and herring bone veins, glossy, impossibly imposing, its central shoot scrolled into a beetroot spike before loosening into a funnel then relaxing into leaves beneath another shoot. Everyone says how splendid, and then, when’s it going to flower? Which it won’t, it’ll be dead long before it has a chance to consider this. It’s enough that now, every day, it is here, revealing a fresh leaf and spike every few days. The...
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