May

This morning I felt like a goddess of spring.

(as I typed the word ‘spring’, the phone call I was making put me on hold – to the sound of spring birdsong. Don’t you just love serendipity?)

After a couple of distinctly fraught days, I had ten hours sleep and wandered into the garden in my dressing gown, clutching a mango and kiwi smoothie in my hand.

Now you probably have vision of a woman drifting among the shrubberies of a vast, secluded garden, one hand round a glass tumbler of fruit juice, the other delicately lifting the ecru lace of her trailing negligee clear of the dew-soaked grass.

Let me disillusion you…

My gardens are vast only in my imagination, and in my ambition for them. In actual fact they are two patches in front of the house, each measuring approximately 10’ by 14’. The negligee was a shapeless mauve bathrobe, so attacked by overactive cats that the threads hang from it in tangles. The glass tumbler was outsize plastic beaker I blend my smoothies in.

Oh, and the village road (albeit, thank God, a mostly quiet one) runs right past the front of the house, so I get to startle the early morning drivers.

Nonetheless, the smoothie was delicious (100% organic, with fruit supplied by these people) the garden is bursting into life, loving the showers and sunshine we’ve been having recently, and somehow those scant ten minutes of pottering, plucking pests from the leaves, turning the arbour cushions to dry and encouraging climbers to cling made me feel on top of the world.

My garden may not be the world’s biggest, but I find the whole world in my garden.

Appearances can be deceptive.