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Interlude

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This weekend I visited my parents, who live in Letchworth, the world’s first Garden City. I was reminded how refreshing it is to walk in different places, especially those which are familiar but changed. On Sunday morning we walked part of the Letchworth Greenway . It is a millennium project, put in place after I left home, so it’s not a walk I grew up with. The path is shared, mostly amicably, by walkers, runners and cyclists and is 13.6 miles long, encircling the whole town. One day I would like to walk it all, setting out early one morning in the dawn light, just for a sense of completeness. Dusty chalky soil crunches underfoot. Fields that I remember from my teenage years as being just another monoculture field of wheat or oilseed rape, are now set aside for wildlife, and the scrubland (which has an image problem, seen as scruffy, but provides vital habitat for a wide range of species) is dotted with hawthorn, blackthorn, and bramble. I half remember a quote about “the thorn is the...
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Change

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Until very recently my 1970s house, with its pebble-dashed exterior and white UPVC windows, came accessorised with another suburban cliché - the leylandii hedge. Leylandii (Cupressus × leylandii) is a fast growing conifer hybrid. It is almost always sterile and so all the plants we see in garden centres  will have been propagated by cuttings. This is a plant that humans have encouraged into life, wanting a rapid thick hedge to protect from the prying eyes of the neighbours. The tallest example of this relatively young species is said to be a 40m (130ft) specimen at Bedgebury National Pinetum in Kent. However, its ability to quickly reach height is also one of the downsides, with leylandii hedges often cited in disputes, including gruesomely in 2003 becoming implicated in a murder, where a man allegedly shot his neighbour after an argument about a hedge. Boundaries are touchy subjects it seems. Around the same time as these sad happenings, we were house hunting. I remember viewing ...
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Warmth

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  “What has made you feel warm in the last week?” J asked as we stood in the willow circle at the end of our fourth session of the Grow Leader course. Meteorologically we did of course finally experience physical warmth last week, with Thursday 5th March declared by the Met Office as the UK’s hottest day of 2026 so far. On Wednesday and Thursday I ate both breakfast and lunch outside, soaking up the sunshine and listening to birdsong. But as we went round the circle on Friday we collectively agreed to expand the definition of warmth to include ideas of emotional warmth, joy and contentment. Here are some of my warm feelings from this week: Spotting a blackbird with a beakful of moss, en route to nest-building endeavours. Watching the full moon rise fiercely orange through the branches of the plum tree. A handful of salad leaves added to my lunch one day, picked for me by a colleague at the community allotment. Pounding the pavements after dark with Redfield Ramblers Anonymous. A le...
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Journeying

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Admitting that you don’t drive (often assumed to be the same as can’t, but I would argue there’s a subtle difference) often seems to make people uncomfortable. There is a sense that being able to drive is just something that all sensible adults must do. Maybe it’s that quote attributed to Thatcher about a man who finds himself on the bus after the age of 25 being considered a failure. Although after some digging, like many oft-repeated aphorisms, it’s not even clear whether she actually said it. But given that she was a big fan of individualistic self reliance, it’s easy to believe that she wasn’t keen on communal travel. My personal theory is that being a non-driver not only affects your journey time, but also impacts on how you experience the world. Waiting at bus stops has not completely equipped me with a zen like patience, but I do my best to embrace my life as it is. Last week I took my daughter to visit a private exam centre in Bath. Due to autistic burnout she was absent from s...
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Fragments

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Fragments Sometimes the world is too wide, Too big and too difficult Instead we must stitch together a life from Fragments, scraps, glimpses Carpets of snowdrops The first crocus in the garden Hands in the soil A communal sieving of compost Home-made birthday cakes A freshly shaved jaw Coffee in bed Weaving voices in harmony A small cat fighting my pen Invading my notebook Back outside for a close encounter A robin grabs a wobbling worm I have set myself a slightly arbitrary target of writing and publishing something here once a week. The world does seem a particularly difficult place at the moment, so fragments will have to do for today. This piece tries to sum up a week of small things.
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Space to Grow

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Being outside more connects you with the reality of the seasons. On Friday I was hit by this in a very physical way, cycling back from Grow Wilder in a steady cold rain that froze my face, made me curse that I hadn’t packed my big winter gloves or my waterproof trousers. As I gritted my teeth and pedalled on grimly, I was definitely questioning my life choices, thinking wistfully of a nice warm car. All the precious glimpses of early spring I’d been spotting during the week; bulbs blooming, blossom flushing along leafless branches, tight packed buds everywhere, seemed very far away at that point. But I am also reminded that the seasons are contextual, where my damp experience of February contrasted with my husband’s week in Montreal for work. Images shared to the family WhatsApp showed snow all around, here was the deep cold winter of fairy tales, temperatures well below zero, between -15 and -20℃. Back home in Bristol, thawing out by the heater and sharing a cup of tea with my daughte...
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Saturation Point

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When I was a teenager, there was a TV programme called Ground Force, where Alan Titchmarsh and team would descend on a small garden for the weekend to spring a makeover on the surprised resident. An instant garden, revealed with a flourish in a format designed to provoke a flood of grateful weeping from the owner of the garden. Watching other people cry happy tears is apparently good telly. In reality, and in my experience, making a garden is a much slower process, and because it is something alive, it is always changing. We moved into our house over twenty years ago and it has taken time for me to feel confident that this is really my patch. For several years we lived with the garden as it was, mostly grass, a narrow pinched bed at one end with some explosive leggy Hebe. Several tall dark conifers and a tatty garden shed lurked in the sunniest part of the garden. It took me several years for me to feel brave enough to have the conifers cut down, and then to ignore the protests of my h...
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