Things About Which I Am Inexplicably Melancholy (Or 'February')

• London, bulbs that I cradled with my ungloved hands, pushed firmly into cold wet soil alive with worms, wrapped gently in a coat of clay and compost, bulbs pushing shoots up through the fallen leaves of the 15 foot bay tree, in the shadow of our red brick terrace, without me.

• Our flat in Glasgow, that it is still there but it will never be ours again. The huge windows pouring light over bare floorboards, the open shelves in the kitchen where my beautiful things sat and collected dust, the train rattling through the garden making said beautiful things shake slightly, the leaves of trees blowing in the wind beneath us, living high in the rainclouds. The place where I recovered from operations, injected myself with hormones, brought my babies home from the hospital and watched them grow. 

• Spring time in Edinburgh, pink and white blossom falling from the hundreds of trees that line the Meadows, tiny ballerinas showering the heads of people rushing to and from work, babies sleeping in pushchairs, dogs sniffing at lamposts. Spring time in France, the day when you are driving to the shop and all of a sudden there are the brightest green leaves where before were just row upon endless row of bare brown vines. Spring time every place that has trees.  

• That bit of dead rabbit on the way to the beach that Lyra tries to make off with every time we walk past, only recognisable as a former rabbit by the one long soft ear still attached to the otherwise furless, fleshless bag of bunny offal hanging from a splayed skeleton.

• Our kite, dashed from the sky during an attempt to be the kind of parent who says 'yes' to things, not 'maybe another time, when daddy is here'. Slammed repeatedly against the ground by the capricious, violent wind, pounced on by the dog, yelled at by the children, its horizontal strut snapped right in two. 

• My children, growing and getting bigger and learning to read and write. Once they can read and write what will they need me for? The world will be theirs.

Happy long weekend lovers. The chances of me writing this week's Doing, Reading, Listening with Widdle and Puke at home, bouncing off the walls and asking me to do stuff with them are pretty low so I'll see you next week, when maybe I'll have finished a book! 

The melancholy and promise of April in the garden.

Things are looking up in the garden. For a while there it was all brown and grey and really quite grim - not just in our garden, everywhere - and I was beginning to wonder (as I do every year) quite why we are living in the god awful country. Although I do try to remember that we used to have it worse. At least here while it was brown and grey and wet and grim I was not also continuously freezing my tits off. We've been back to Scotland a couple of times over the winter and I spent almost all of the first trip with a boob in each hand, in a desperate effort to keep my both my hands and my boobs from freezing and dying right there and then. The second time I took three jumpers with me and I wore them all. 

It was a ridiculously mild winter here. There was no frost, none, which apparently means that this will be The Year of the Slug. The little fuckers are already decimating our lettuces and our courgettes. The surface reason for us not having done anything about them is that we're 'organic gardeners (man). We don't believe in like, chemicals and shit.' But the truth (as it so often is) is that we are crippled by indecision. There are too many products and techniques and opinions out there. So I know! Let's not do anything and see what happens! (Our plants will get eaten, I have a feeling that is what will happen.) We have a flock of magpies though and I watch them from the kitchen window, hopping up onto the wall with gigantic snails clutched in their beaks and I smile. I can't bring myself to kill snails but I'm more than happy to watch the local bird life do it. 

We are still landscaping the garden and the design is ever-evolving. We laid out the initial shapes before we had even moved south of the border, measuring the garden using google earth and a ruler, and although we have stuck with the general shapes filling in the blanks has been a continuous process. What we thought was going to be a lawn is about to become a deck with a structure floating above it, what we thought would be the deck is going to become a secluded nook, boxed in with bamboos (Sophie called it a 'shagging corner'. Glaswegian.) 

The state of flux and the continuously shifting plans hurt my brain but the garden is teaching me to have patience, to trust that what looks like a shitty piece of rocky earth right now is going to look like the garden of Eden in a couple of months, with or without my plans. I feel like even if you have no interest in gardening, if plants bore you and mud makes you nervous, you should probably try to grow stuff for a year or two just to teach you All The Lessons about patience and faith and the triumph of life over death and the inevitability that some of your much loved work is going to get eaten by maleficent shell-less terrestrial gatropod molluscs, but more will survive. 

When we started planning our garden the initial conversation about our hopes and plans went something like this:

Nye: I want to grow loads and loads of fruit. I want apples and plums and cherries. Loads of them
Me: (with somewhat less conviction) But flowers, I want to grow flowers too. I like flowers.
Nye: We need fruit. 

He bought fruit trees, so many fruit trees, and they're bloody everywhere. From the three cherry trees we are set to have six cherries this year. Six. Which is five more than we had last year and six more than we managed to eat last year.  The apple trees are doing magnificently though and the blossom was utterly, unbearably beautiful and probably what heaven smells like. Before we started gardening I did not know that flowers turn into fruit. Let me lay it out for you; Flowers (the pretty things with the petals and the fluffy yellow bits in the middle) turn into Fruit (the edible stuff that you get in plastic bags at the supermarket and that makes both snack and pudding.) The petals fall off the flowers and the whole thing sort of turns inside out before swelling rapidly into apple, pear, plum etc. I didn't know. I had never really considered how trees made fruit before I started gardening but if pressed I would have offered up something about maybe nubbins? Tree nubbins? That swell? 

We're gradually learning about the plants we have bought that aren't fruit trees (there's not a lot of learning to be done about fruit trees if you've been researching them since before you started looking for a house with a garde.) and this year feels like less of a shot in the dark than last. We have been going to Columbia Road Flower Market, which is by far the cheapest place in London to buy plants, and coming back with some things we know and some things we don't. 

I bought six pots of the Muscari below (N: 'what's that blue thing?' C: 'Either muscari or grape hyacinth'. So much time lost to confusion over the many different names that exist for the same bloody plants) for £2, because they were about to 'go over' (die back for the year). But they should come back next year and there should be about twice as many of them as I bought.

The eucayptus tree was another Columbia Road bargain - £5 and it has the most beautiful silver foliage and delicate sweet little buds of fresh growth. Sadly the guy who sold it to Nye was a lying git and it does not in fact stop growing at 8ft; given half the chance it would keep growing to around 50, dwarfing our house and shading in our garden and potentially breaking through the foundations of ours and the neighbours' properties. Ha! What a jolly joke you played on us Mr Columbia Road! Luckily we know of this thing called google, so when we found out we quickly contained the beast in a pot and it may or may not grow much bigger at all without access to the ground but at least we buy some time while we learn about pruning it. Or killing it, if need be. 

And then there are bulbs. We are not good at planting bulbs. 

The thing about bulbs is that they need to be planted in the winter if you want them to flower in the spring and you don't have to have been reading here long to know that I am Not Good at winter. The winter is cold and wet and dark and I generally don't want to be awake let alone outdoors, so getting planting done really is asking too much. Which is a shame because spring flowers are an almost perfect antidote to SAD, a blazing reminder that winter is over and spring is coming and that you survived another hibernation. It's just not much good if you're too bloody depressed to plant them. 

One red tulip that I planted last year came back but it was weedy and tiny and a little bit pathetic. That didn't stop me from sitting beside it throughout April, gazing into its petals is if they were the flames of a fire and whispering 'hello my beautiful'. Next year, next year I will plant more. I really will. (I probably won't. Monty Don writes beautifully about seasonal depression and its subsequent affect on bulb planting in his memoir The Jewel Garden. When I switched on Gardener's World and in the second episode he mentioned that he hadn't planted any tulips this year I chuckled to myself and thought 'that's because you were too busy crying and eating cheese, wasn't it my melancholy friend? I was right there with you.')

Tulips are just kind of a ball ache though, aren't they? Gouging holes in icy cold clay that doesn't want to be gouged is tolerable for 5-10 minutes. But in 5-10 minutes you can plant 5-10 bulbs and 5-10 flowers might look nice in a pot but they look a bit pathetic in a 50ft garden. And then the fuckers don't even come back the following year. (According to some gardeners. Others say they do. In our experience they mostly don't, except for the one that did and it came back a quarter of the size.) At some point in March Nye found the one bag of tulip bulbs I had bought in a fit of January enthusiasm, they were growing there and then in a plastic packet in the kitchen. Shrugging and not expecting much planted them in a semi-ritualistic circle around the base of a bamboo pot. To everyone's surprise most of them flowered. Next year I will buy more bulbs, I'm just going to wait until the ground is soft and warm to plant them. 

Clearly from the photos, we managed to do some. Ella and I planted 30 daffodils and 15 alliums, they both felt worth it as they will not only come back next year, they will multiply. That's like free plants. We planted little daffs, the cheapest ones in the garden centre (tête-a -tête, I believe), and I loved them. They're not fancy, they're not big, they're just tiny and yellow and to my surprise each bulb shot out 5-8 flowers. Tiny yellow daffodils with many flowers are Pure Joy. 

Top left is a camelia that we found in a pot behind the shed when we moved in. The shed is gone and the plant looked dead but this year, although the bush is still knee high, it rewarded us for moving it into the light with an abundance of leathery leaves and creamy delicious flowers that could double as roses to the unfamiliar. Next to it is a black sambuca (like the drink!). A darker cousin of the common elderflower, with deep purpley black leaves and lilac plates of tiny flowers. It is currently weighed down with a plague of black aphids which we don't know how to deal with. We have sprayed them with soapy water and they wither and die quite pleasingly but the people on gardening forums who say that the shriveled corpses will act as a deterrent to new infestations are either having a laugh or haven't encountered South London aphids, who are totally nails (innit.)

The fluffy white flower is a pulsatilla, which is a crap name and a fairly inoffensive flower. It's real charm is the seed heads it produces (see next month's installment of Garden Chat, due spring 2015) and beside it is this kind of ugly variegated shrub that is about 12 ft tall and for two weeks a year sprouts tiny purple flowers, the appearance of which has the whole bush buzzing with eager, hungry, recently-awoken bees. 

After the grey of winter the green of April glows, at certain times and on certain plants with the dangerous throb of kryptonite, the cool assurance of jade, the burning acid of a lime slush puppy. 

(Heuchera, Hellebore, Astilbe, Dill -or maybe Fennel. Who can tell? I've taken to thinking of them as Fill and Dennel, because they're both the bloody same aren't they?)

Here we have; 

the rhubarb rock maroon of fresh peony shoots,

the pistachio ice cream flecked with raspberry of Japonica Firelight,

the burnished rust of the smallest, babiest of Chinese Red Birch,

the coal black of our final and most expensive attempt at phylloscatus nigra (which keeps bloody dying. You're not supposed to be able to kill it even under your best efforts. WHY do ours keep biting the dust?) 

Early spring is the time in the greenhouse that I love the most. It is warmer than it is outside but being in there doesn't yet feel like being the bug victim of a 7 year old with a magnifying glass. It smells warm and damp, of that time and place between life and death, where things could go either way . There is still room for a seat, before all of the shelves are filled and the seed trays spill onto the floor. The strawberries - commercial varieties this year, on the advice of a friend who grows fruits the size of your fist that taste like childhood and summer and 10pm sunsets- are waking up, their tiny perfect flowers promising so much, if only you remember to water them this year. The tomatoes are but two-leaved shoots, the sweet peas reaching for the skies. Tiny spiders hatch and crawl over the plants, pollinating the strawberries but not yet big enough to crisscross the doorway with webs at head height that will wrap around your face and make you scream every damn day of the summer. 

The crab apple tree in the neighbouring and abandoned orchard  is drenched, laden with blossom, blossom that by the end of the summer will have lost its petals, turned inside out, swollen into fruits and fallen from the tree into the overgrown grass. We will stand at the upstairs windows staring at the carpet of rotting apples, cursing both the owners of this quarter acre of promise and our own inability to find a way in. 

Things, thoughts.

Hello. It is March. I don't know how that happened. I took these photos in January and February, they're all old old old now. I've written three blog posts this year which is a new low. I blame instagram; no one blogs any more, no one hardly even tweets any more. (That was the most hideous sentence I've ever written, I want you to know that I know that.) 

I started a writing class in the hope that it might prompt me to write more, it didn't. I asked Nye for a film camera for my birthday in the hope that it might prompt me to photograph more, it didn't. It did not help that he bought me a film camera but no film. Remember the Christmases when you would get a battery operated toys but no batteries and there were no shops open that sold batteries on Christmas day, so instead of playing with your new toy you spent a lot of the day picking it up and looking at it from different angles, testing the buttons to see if maybe they would do something anyway, trying hard to look grateful for your new - temporarily useless - toy?

It's okay though, my aim for this year was to do not a lot of anything and while that has only really been a success in regards to writing and taking photos (the very things that I was making space in my life to do more of) everything else feels less pressured when my general philosophy is one of Do Very Little and when the work and the meetings and the family commitments are brief interludes to the eating and the sitting and the listening to the radio. 

I'm gradually settling into the weirdness that is W&P being at pre-school and Nye and I having time to ourselves. We are mostly getting on with business in this new way that means we can both work at the same time and that we have to share an office (THE HORROR) but there is also gardening and lunching and childless trips to ikea and Nye preparing to take part in a week long  mountain bike race in the Alps and me preparing to go to New York all by myself in the Autumn. A year ago both being left alone with W&P for a week or leaving N alone with them would have been unthinkable, now it seems eminently doable. I call that progress. 

W&P love pre-school, P bursts through the door in the morning with her arms spread wide and announces to the room "I'M HERE!", W smiles secretively at the end of the day when I ask her what she's done and says nothing. They adore their teachers, one in particular whom P assures me 'does good look aftering'. 

We are lucky that it has worked out so well, we weren't exactly proactive when it came to choosing an educational establishment. Our technique was thus: search nearest pre-schools on google maps, peer through the fence of the closest, see incredibly beautiful outdoor play area, download application forms, leave application forms sitting on desk for three months, send them in in a panic a few days before the deadline. W&P's first day was the first time we had seen further than the front desk and we were prepared to admit that we'd made a stupid, lazy mistake and to start looking for somewhere new. Amazingly, we didn't need to; laziness, last-minute panic and a total lack of research served us pretty well. (Relief sighed). 

The thing about sending my children somewhere else for half of the week is that I enjoy the other half that I spend with them so much more. Or I do now that they have settled the fuck down. They were really quite horrible for a few weeks there and I was genuinely worried that pre-school had broken them. They went from enjoying each other's company and disappearing to play together for hours a day to fighting (both physically and verbally) from the second they woke up in the morning until the minute I switched the light off in the evening. The moments that they weren't brawling they spent either shitting in their pants or whining 'what are we going to dooooooooooooooooo mummy?' with absolutely nothing but 'go to nursery' deemed by either of them to be an adequate response. 

They seem to have finally settled to the fact that at home no one is willing to give them a bag of flour, a bowl of water and a wooden spoon, or to let them loose with a litre of green paint and 8 feet of paper. They are accepting that home is boring and that that is okay because in a day or two they will get to go back to that magical place where they can do pretty much whatever the hell they want and someone else will clean up after them. 

I'm trying to be better about playing with them, but the thing is; I don't really like playing. (There, I admitted it. Call social services.) I like watching them play but I do not want to play myself; I want to get shit done or do nothing and three year olds (TWO three year olds) are conducive to neither. Yesterday I let them help me fill up seed trays with compost in preparation for sowing. I gave them a couple of teaspoons and a bag of really expensive seed compost and I only snapped 'stop spilling it on the grass' three times in the space of an hour. Yes, it took an hour. Everything takes 16 times longer than it should when you let three year olds help. The rest of that hour I spent saying in the sort of voice that you would use to talk someone off the ledge of a tall building 'slowly, calmly, gently', ostensibly to W&P but I think everyone knew that I was talking to myself. (Apropos).  I find myself appreciating my own mother and the hours that she spent sitting on a bench in the play park or traipsing around the Museum of Scotland behind me. She hated both the play park and the museum but significant portions of my childhood memories take place in one or the other and I don't remember her complaining until I was old enough for the appeal of both to have worn off. Cheers mum. 

As deeply boring as I find 'play', I love spending time with W&P reading and chatting. Those kids crack me up and my mother in law confirms my suspicion that they are in fact significantly funnier than most children. I have no particular feelings beyond wonder about their intelligence, beauty or developmental pace but my pride in their sense of humour goes for miles. I couldn't have had un-funny children, it just wouldn't have done.

I'm sure that there were other things I've been meaning to write here. At least once a day I compose a new and different blog post in my head. Sadly thinking about doing things isn't the same as actually doing them. This is a notion that I struggle with a lot; I am only just recently, after two years of gym-going, accepting that thinking about running does not have the same physiological benefits as actually running.  Similarly; knitting, writing, blogging, conversing with people. It's really quite unfair.

For now though, I'm off to pick up W&P. Every time I want to burst through the door, throw my arms wide and yell "I'M HERE!", just to see what it feels like. But I cannot conceive of a world in which I have the sense of presence, confidence and abandon that my three year old does. 

July, ramblings.

Here are some photos of our garden in July. July, which has been and gone. Everything has changed faster than I can keep track of. We have lived here for over nine months now. I keep telling people we have just moved to London, but we haven't, it's been almost a year.

My kids are nearly three. That's three years. Three years old. It's really time to start actually parenting them, not just making sure that they don't kill themselves or each other. We should probably teach them to use the toilet and sleep in proper beds, but lord I'm tired. Yesterday Nye went mountain biking all day (he's better by the way) and left me at home with the girls. It was the first time in as long as I can remember that I enjoyed being alone with them all day. Individually they're great, but together they fight and whine and moan and cry and steal each others' shit and it drives me completely nuts. I shout at them 'WHY CAN'T YOU JUST BE NICE TO EACH OTHER FOR FIVE MINUTES?' and they look at me like I'm stupid. They have a point.

Somehow it's over half way through the year but we've only photographed seven of this year's twenty weddings. To my surprise, most of those weddings are in and around London. It's pretty cool.

On Wednesday Nye and I are going to France, by ourselves. We'll be away for five days. I'm photographing a party one of those days, and we'll spend two of them travelling, but the other two are all ours, all alone in France. It will be our fifth wedding anniversary while we're there. Some of you started reading this blog more than five years ago. Hi. And thank you. It blows my mind that you keep coming back, despite the fact that for the last three years I've mostly been writing 'I don't know what to write.'

A few months ago I started writing properly. I got up every morning before anyone else was awake and I sat at the computer and wrote Shit I Can Remember for an hour. Then W&P would wake up and I would spend another hour drowning out their hysterical yelling with white noise through my headphones. I did this every day for a month. I wrote 28,000 words. Then I stopped. For a long time my heart was too sore. Today I woke up at 6.30am and started again. Who knows if it will stick this time.

Over the last three months I've photographed nine families in and around London. To my surprise, I love it. I think maybe this is what I want to do when I grow up. I've also started building another website, with my personal work. I really want to get more into lifestyle photography, photographing people and places and spaces and things. I kind of want to show you it but I've kind of called the business my real name, and I'm not sure I'm ready to share that. For now it's okay because I have no idea how to get any work photographing people and places and spaces and things. Does anyone from Country Living read my blog? Would you like to hire me please?

Seedlings, neuroses.

The interior monologue of a first-time gardener.

'Look at all the small green things! I planted those! Wait, I didn't plant all of those, which ones are weeds and which ones are the things I planted? Are these weeds? Or are they poppy seedlings? What about these ones, are they weeds or cosmos? Are these small purpley ones weeds? Or are the not weeds? WHICH ONES ARE WEEDS? WHY DIDN'T I SOW THINGS IN STRAIGHT LINES LIKE MONTY DON TOLD ME TO? I don't know which ones to pull out. Actually, I don't think I want to pull out any of them, they're green and the garden is brown and green is better than brown. But I'm sure I've heard that you're supposed to pull out weeds, so maybe I should pull out something? There, that one looked rubbish, I've pulled it out. Now I'm sad. Am I done now? What is a weed anyway? Isn't it just a free plant? Maybe I should just leave everything? But then it's going to end up a mess and all those pretty poppies and ammis and cosmos and larkspur and delphiniums I planted will be swamped by ugly plants and it will be tragic. But what if I pull them out, thinking that they're weeds? Oh balls, it's all going to be a disaster. I don't like gardening. It's too difficult. Cara, pull yourself together and stop being a pansy. Ohh, pansies, I forgot to plant pansies. FOCUS CARA. WEEDING. Okay, I'm just going to pull out all of these ones that look like they're probably not something I planted because they're everywhere and I didn't plant anything everywhere. But maybe I'll leave a few, in case they're pretty. Fuck, gardening is stressful. I need a drink.'

*sorry, I can't find a credit for the image. There's only so much good stuff that comes up when you google pictures of crazy women gardening and this one came from one of those lovely tumblrs that are all pretty, pretty, kittens, pretty, woman in garden, pretty pretty, anime porn, pretty, EXCUSE ME WHAT WAS THAT.' You know the ones. 

Gardening, March.

It's Spring. Let's get that out of the way first with a giant HA BLOODY HA. It was warmer in December. This has really proven to be the year to buy snow boots (which finally arrived by the way, and ohmygod they are the ugliest and most wonderful things I have ever put my feet in. I wear them when it's not snowing just because it's like going outside wearing teddy bears on your feet, waterproof ones.) It has snowed more times in London in the last 4 months than I remember in any YEAR in Scotland.

I have lost faith that anything is ever going to grow, let alone flower in our garden. At the beginning of the month it was mild enough to fool us into thinking that spring was coming. We hired a rotavator and The Menfolk ploughed what existed of the old, bowed, scrubby lawn in preparation for laying turf a few weeks later. That time has never come, it being too wet or frosty or just plain foul. Now after weeks of Winter pt 3 and of us walking all over the freshly turned ground we have a nicely compacted muddy field. We have laid out sticks and string to mark where the beds are going to go and the spaces inbetween are where the lawn will be, one day. If I take my glasses off, squint and down a couple of tequilas I can almost imagine what it might look like. Then I put my glasses back on and it looks like experimental mud and bamboo art again. 

There are a number of triangular fruit and flower beds lining the edges of our garden. I write 'a number' because I can't actually remember the number, maybe 4, maybe 5, possibly 6? Dunno. Only one of them is all planned out and ironically it's the ones we were most worried about, the one we considered turning into a sandpit. It's the one bit of the garden that doesn't and won't get any direct sun, but one unplanned trip to the Secret Garden Centre in Crystal Palace last month found us coming home with a couple of ferns, a periwinkle and a foxglove from their excellent selection of plants specifically for shaded beds. Added to the couple of hellebores we'd bought a few weeks before, our shaded bed was full. Hellebores; why didn't I know about hellebores before? They flower in the winter, THE WINTER! Pretty, delicate, faintly coloured flowers. I love them. 

The blossom tree that we uprooted and put into a pot when we moved in (it was right in the middle of what was the become the greenhouse) burst into amazing, lurid flower last month. Then repeated wind, rain and snow storms beat the crap out of it and now it's a soggy, reddish-brown mess. 

We borrowed the Giant Book of Pruning (or some-such) from the library and I've barely seen Nye since. I had no idea that pruning was a) so interesting, b) so complicated, c) so fun. While I don't love the book (the diagrams make no sense at all) chopping bits of stuff with sharp blades is immensely therapeutic. Nye has pruned the fruit trees we bought, one to become a half standard (I don't know what it means either) and others to become fans or espaliers. Which means growing them flat against a wall or fence, like this. Nye is in love with his fruit trees, he would fill the whole garden with them if he could and sold them to me with promises of free fruit and pretty blossom. Turns out they're unlikely to fruit for the next three years. He did not tell me this until after they had arrived. 

One of the apple trees is called Scrumptous Bush. I'm almost certain he only bought it so he could shout 'scrumptious bush Pix' at me and chuckle every time I walk by it. 

I have fallen in love with the greenhouse. There's nothing much in it at the moment, just a few small strawberry plants which look out at their unfortunate, scrawnier, snow-ridden siblings sitting outside in the raised bed. They're the lucky ones, the ones that won the toss in Nye's experiment to find out if it's preferable to put them in the greenhouse before or after they've flowered. The outside strawberries look so weedy, so cold. It seems cruel to have positioned them just on the other side of the glass from their bigger, better-cared-for litter mates. But perhaps the runts will out-perform them yet, the proof of the neglect is in the eating. Or something like that. 

But the greenhouse; I love it. It's colder than the house but with the added benefit of being 50ft away. So when I'm in there I can hear neither my neighbours or my children, both of whom have been driving me to the edge of reason over the last month. My neighbours with pounding dancehall and my children with being two. The greenhouse is an ideal place to sit, knit, drink coffee, read a book and occasionally lose your shit altogether and have a good sob. 

We're slowly learning more about gardening (me more slowly than Nye, who has been studying the ways and means of plants for the last 3 years, so he'd be ready.) Slowly growing in confidence in both our decisions for new plants and our brutal renovations of the ones that were left behind by the previous owners. We find dirty, faded care tags tramped into the soil and piece them up with the overgrown specimens that hug the perimeter walls. Discovering that that interesting looking shrub in the darkest corner of the garden asks clearly on its label to be placed in full sun and that the small scrubby bush in the pot behind the shed is actually a camellia that with a little care and a lot more light, will give us flowers not unlike the pink tissue ones you make when you're seven and told to make a bunch of paper flowers in art class. 

In learning about gardening I'm learning a new language but for once it doesn't make me want to cry like French, German, Spanish, Gaelic did. It makes me feel eager and excited and curious. Fascinating words flit through my head, play in my mouth and trip off my tongue; mulch, tilth, sessile, vermiculite, ericaceous, a new and beautiful language, at once both science and poetry. We watched Monty Don's French Gardens last month and while the second episode about Potagers, or kitchen gardens, appealed to my gardening style the most, the third episode about French gardens and art was the most interesting to me. It explored the notion of when a garden becomes a work of art, if a garden ever becomes a work of art. That that question can even be asked about something that produces food, flowers and a place to live and rest sums up so much that I'm learning to love about gardening.