The Spring Garden 2025
Whatever happened to the ‘April showers’? I have been heavily occupied with watering due to cracking ground and drooping leaves and not just for new plants. At the time of writing there are no clouds in a clear blue sky, […]
Gardening
The Early Spring Garden 2025
This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green, Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes, Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes. D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) After […]
The Winter Garden 2025
Come, children, gather round my knee; Something is about to be. Tonight’s December thirty-first, Something is about to burst. The clock is crouching, dark and small, Like a time bomb in the hall. Hark! It’s midnight, children dear. Duck! Here […]
The Early Winter Garden 2024
I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their […]
The Autumn Garden 2024
When summer’s end is nighing And skies at evening cloud, I muse on change and fortune And all the feats I vowed When I was young and proud. The weathercock at sunset Would lose the slanted ray, And I would […]
The High Summer Garden 2024
The average lawn, left alone one hundred years, could become a hardwood forest. An admirable project. Still I carry on, following week on week the same mowing pattern, cutting edges, almost sprinting the last narrow swaths. Robert Wrigley (b.1951) At […]
The Spring Garden 2024
If I could stay up late no doubt I’d catch the buds just bursting out; And up from every hidden root Would jump a tiny slender shoot; I wonder how seeds learn the way, They always know the very day- […]
The Early Spring Garden 2024
I watched a blackbird on a budding sycamore One Easter Day, when sap was stirring twigs to the core; I saw his tongue, and crocus-coloured bill Parting and closing as he turned his trill; Then he flew down, seized on […]
The Winter Garden 2024
When winter winds are piercing chill, And through the hawthorn blows the gale, With solemn feet I tread the hill, That overbrows the lonely vale. O’er the bare upland, and away Through the long reach of desert woods, The embracing […]
The Late Autumn Garden 2023
Go from me, summer friends and tarry not: I am no summer friend, but wintry cold, A silly sheep benighted from the fold, A sluggard with a thorn-choked garden plot. Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) Bathing in the warm rays of this […]
The Early Autumn Garden 2023
Who is this coming with pondering pace, Black and ruddy, with white embossed, His eyes being black, and ruddy his face, And the marge of his hair like morning frost? It’s the cider-maker, And appletree-shaker, And behind him on wheels, […]
The High Summer Garden 2023
I love to rise in a summer morn, When the birds sing on every tree; The distant huntsman winds his horn, And the skylark sings with me. William Blake (1757-1827) The soft green leaves of spring have given way to […]