The Water

The Secret Garden 

It’s deepest winter and snow-fall tends to slow things down to a speed that allows other things to start growing. Being surrounded by seeds in all shapes and sizes, I automatically begin developing plans and schemes and simply cannot help imagining next year’s garden…

Speaking with a friend recently about a possible adapatation of the Frances Hodgson Burnett classic for stage, I fall back again on the concept of the garden as a space which confers identity, in this case a meeting place of two rather selfish ten-year-olds whose lives are transformed  through the discovery of the key to a secret garden and the bonds they forge through meeting there. We know that we are strongly influenced by our surroundings and the places wherein we dwell and the idea of the garden offering itself as a way of dealing with alienation and loss is not entirely new. Growth, metamorphosis and new beginnings are images not only prevelant in the world of nature but also in human life.

 Back to the sorting and packing of seeds for the next season as I look out at big flakes of snow accumulating and covering the expanse of the garden with a gentle white blanket. Feeling more than grateful for the beauty of this too, coupled with anticipation for all the new things to come… The art of a seed is that it fills one with the sense of possibility as well as bringing back the memory and warmth of fertile abundance.

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My dear old robot…

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Best espresso ever…

Recently, while helping a friend move house, I decided I needed a proper good cup of coffee so I left my husband battling with an ikea instruction sheet and a half built set of drawers and made my way into town in search of a coffee shop. Following the directions I got from a young man I met, I went down the main street and took the first left and there I was supposed to find, in his words, ‘a really good cup of coffee’. I was about to give up as I couldn’t see a restaurant anywhere down that street. Then I heard him whistling behind me as he pointed to a big black arched doorway which had a very Jack Daniel’s like enamelled sign, announcing ‘Black and Blaze…’ Entering the room, which felt more like a cave or a wine-cellar, it took my eyes a few minutes to adjust to the lighting, in which time I recognized silhouettes of a few men who were standing at a high table ‘tasting’.

I wasn’t quite sure if I was in the right film so I was politely planning my retreat when I was offered a tiny cup of coffee.

Maybe it was the situation – the same way a plain cheese sandwich when savoured at an altitude of 2500 meters after a sharp ascent just tastes so much better… but it was fantastic.
At any rate, for me on that day, that little cup of coffee was a proper life-saver.
Thanks Claude!

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the simple things I find

Summer days

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Blueprint

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Saddle bags

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Ferns and roses

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