Winter is the time of promise because there is so little to do – or because you can now and then permit yourself the luxury of thinking so.
Often he vanished for days down the spiral staircase into the engine-room to overhaul the weary machinery, leaving me with a curt note tacked to his then-favourite aspen, the Aspen Laura-Anne, a white-limbed thing with noisy leaves: ‘A due-south drift, please, love, for a day or two, n’est-ce pas?
To dream a garden and then to plant it is an act of independence and even defiance to the greater world.
Next to blood relationships, come water relationships.
There is always something rough and tumble about planting – because with our clumsy implements we must reach from our atmospheric element down into another, down into the darkness of the soil.
I was a new writer and I was supposed to write all the time, wasn’t I? I had not yet discovered that there are times when one can’t write, one shouldn’t write, times for thought, for deepening, or just reading, or simply living.