To dream a garden and then to plant it is an act of independence and even defiance to the greater world.
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?
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.
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.