If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll often read in my captions about the latest plans and work in my garden. Before I start writing posts about the plants I grow and the seasonal flower beds I’m creating, I wanted to share with you the ‘before’ scenes and layout of my Algarve garden. It was rather exciting but daunting when…
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If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable… then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter 4 (16 July 1903), Letters…
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Just as we were expecting spring to arrive here in West Sussex winter descended upon us. Throughout the winter months I had hoped for some snow and then it finally turned up at the end of February and again in March. The snow storm known as the ‘Beast from the East’ meant we had that winter spring thing happening in…
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“Determined that this diary should start off with a bit of flourish, I sallied forth on this fine winter’s day to see what I could find in bloom. The answer was, quite a lot.” Richard Adams, A Nature Diary from Winter An anthology for the changing seasons“ It’s easy to assume that all the blooms and colour have disappeared when…
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“Nature never did betray…The heart that loved her…For she can so inform the mind that is within us.” From The Nature Notes of an Edwardian Lady by Edith Holden And so begins The Nature Notes of an Edwardian Lady – open on my botanical desk on a November day with its drawing of dock seed. I also have collected here…
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It’s snowdrop season! From January to March – depending on regions and the weather – carpets of snowdrops in woodlands, meadows and gardens signal the end of winter and the promise of spring. Now I might be enthusiastic about walks where I can admire these harbingers of spring but I want my kids – nine year old twins – to…
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