It was June, and the world smelled of roses.
Monday 31 May
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It has stopped raining and the sun has shone. The field explodes. Plants are a foot higher, the hedges a foot thicker. Buds that have been sitting on the edge of flowering for a week or more unfurl in synchrony. All except the nigella; a watched Nigella never flowers. They simply stay at that moment of ready for a week and then you blink and they all come out together.
Wednesday 2 June
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A meeting about the book. One of those meetings where I am asked whether I have any questions when I am not totally sure what I should be asking, so I ask if there will be a launch party. The publisher looks apologetic. Launch parties rarely sell books she says, and everyone gets so drunk that they forget about buying anything, so now they are ‘author-led’. I wonder how much it would be to rent a space at Petersham during Chelsea week.
Thursday 3 June
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We drive to Dartmouth to visit family in their cabin. They are staying for a week in a gloriously wooden, hand-made house. It is owned by the sister and brother-in-law of Katherine Hooker, who made my favourite tweed jacket. (I spent my first ever pay check, earned as a researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry, on a polo lesson and a Katherine Hooker jacket. I left London in 2009 with barely a penny to my name, but I’d had a lot of fun.) I can’t quite explain how or why I know of the cabin’s owner’s family tree but it does suggest I spend too much time on Instagram. The children run around the garden with my camera and pose and take beautiful pictures of Morag with the top of her head cut off. Or Hugo’s tail. Or sticks. One photograph of the chicken skewers on the barbecue appears entirely serendipitously to be perfectly composed and focused. (I won’t share it here because if you are averse to meat, I wouldn’t want to spring it on you, but it really is an excellent photo.) Maud rarely stays still long enough to have her photo taken and she is retrieved from the kitchen where she is helping herself to salad. The landscape is beautiful, with a glimpse of the seas from the garden. We drive home in the light of a salmon pink sunset over the curved, verdant valleys, so characteristic of that bit of Devon.
Friday 4 June
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The heat. Stifling in the office and barely less so in the lane to Netherclay where we walk on the hard dusty ground. We loop around and come back on ourselves so the walk can be punctuated by swims. Supper in the courtyard, under the pear tree. Asparagus, still, roasted in the wood oven. It has not been a good year for my asparagus and I fear that every meal of it might be the last.
Saturday 5 June
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A month of jobs fitted into one day. The tenders planted out, more sweet peonies and the start of the peony harvest. Firsts everywhere; tall white foxglove and a diminutive pure white aquilegia hidden under the bay tree. The first corncockle. The first viola. A wild strawberry, tiny but shared, because it was the first. The very very last tulip. A sudden rush of Verbascum and its accompanying mullein caterpillars. Roses everywhere. I trim hedges and I hoe beds. I plant out weld and woad. By the end of the day, I have to scrub my feet with a nail-brush and I ache all over when I sit down. Allan Jenkins says we should all be sitting around and lapping up the sunshine. I rolled my eyes at that, although I generally hang on Mr Jenkins’ every word.
Sunday 6 June
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A slow start. I asked for book recommendations in Gather last week and people were kind enough to share their favourites. Inspired by an essay that Alice Vincent wrote for Gather, we are having something of a month of garden writing appreciation. The first recommendation was The Morville Hours by Katherine Swift and each morning this week has started with coffee and a chapter. This morning, two chapters and two coffees, simply because it's Sunday. It truly is exquisitely written. I am as guilty as any of us of waiting until I have got to the end of my to do list before I take time out for delight. To think that I will replenish when finally I am empty. The moments that I have taken this week to just sit with a book have been golden.
I have been writing too. A whole book on bearded irises with India Hurst of Vervain. Because if anyone knows everything about bearded irises, it is India.
I hope, like Allan, you are finding joy and peace in these golden moments of June.