It’s been a whole year now since my friend and neighbour Hannah, a jeweller, weaver and gardener asked me if I’d like to share her large allotment in our village 1. She’d gardened half of it for years but the woman who had the other half had broken her leg mid-season and inevitably with…

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I’ve been walking again this week, not the long journey from Cornwall to the Scottish border of last year when I was walking away from an old life and into a new one, although I wouldn’t have said then that’s what I was doing, but more a slow walk of looking and thinki…

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Looking after someone else’s garden when they are away is a blessing and potentially a curse. A blessing because it’s not yours, and so much easier to see what needs to be done now, and what can wait until next time. In my own tiny garden distractions come in battalions from “Oh! …

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A young woman this week told me that the word ‘buttercup’ had been lost from the Oxford Junior Dictionary along with ‘acorn’ and ‘conker’, replaced with ‘chat room’, ‘broadband’ and ‘analogue’. We were working alongside each other in a light-filled room just off Hadrian’s wall, making prints from the native grasses and wildflowers we’d just collected. …

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While the attention of the gardening world was upon the Chelsea Flower Show, I was over four hundred miles north in a garden deep in the Pentland Hills between Glasgow and Edinburgh, Little Sparta1 a place I’ve long wanted to write about. I remember the first time I heard about it. It was in 1994, July. My friend and …

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It was bright May day in Copenhagen, a city not famed for its sunny weather, when I schlepped though the suburbs to go and find a rooftop farm and garden called OsterGRO1, built on top of an old car showroom. I’d heard about this place a couple of years back w…

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All the way through this freezing April I haven’t been able to get this poem, Primavera, out of my head.

Primavera by Robin Robertson 1

for Cait

The Brimstone is back
in the woken hills of Vallombrosa,
passing the word
from speedwell to violet
wood anemone to celandine.
I could walk to you now

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When was it I first noticed the orchard, that scruffy, rabbit-infested, weedy bit of land adjacent to my allotment? I know I didn’t see it for many months even though I walked past it most days en route to the plot, which needed all my attention as it had been neglected for well over two years. I took on that allotment somewhat reluctantly1 because I’d…

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It was the very fag end of winter, a day almost thirty years ago when spring felt further away than in January, even though it was so close I could smell it. I heard on a radio programme this week 1 that you’re far more likely to be agitated and impatient when the longed-for event is near rather than far …

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Among the letters this week, along with gloomy mail telling me to start paying for a funeral plan to ‘avoid disappointment’ (I’ll be dead, so how does that work?) was a handwritten envelope, excitingly with a foreign postmark. Issue One of the hand-produced Zine, Phrygana 1, a Greek w…

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Popping up all around my garden in this cheerless, damp February are Cyclamen coum looking as if a flight of butterflies with upswept wings have been blown off-course and landed here by mistake. A woman walking past my tiny front garden at the weekend stopped to look while I was doing battle…

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“So what was it about your tall, handsome, well-read, political-activist husband that first attracted you to him” I once asked the pioneering gardener, grower and all-round legend that is Joy Larkcom1. She looked me dead straight in the eye and said, “Because on Valentine’s Day h…

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It’s late-January, much too early for anything apart from the bleached stems of moorgrass and sedge, but I’m out on the hunt. I’ve promised a friend I’ll try and find some snowdrops although as doomed attempts go, this one is pretty high up there on the scale of hope over expectation.

I shouldn’t really be here a…

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On January 1st at dawn, which is around 8.30am here in the north Pennines, I’m out in the garden in my dressing gown looking for signs of life. I’ve become my mother, shuffling around in smooth-soled slippers trying to avoid patches of ice, f…

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“An allotment’s come up for rent, are you interested?”

My neighbour and friend, Hannah, had dropped a card through my door written in her flowing looped handwriting, impossible to resist. I messaged her straight back. “Thanks Han, but I don’t think an allotment is what I need at the moment.”

I felt churlish. All the next day, I couldn’t stop thinking a…

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The door flew open and with a blast of freezing air in they all walked, laughing. They were dressed in heavy boots, rugged up against the winter cold and all of them clasping things in their reddened hands; seed heads, dried flowers, moss, rose hips, lichened twigs from some rare tree.…

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It’s late November and I’m cold. Worse than cold, I ache with it. I sit here up in my attic overlooking the fields full of meandering sheep, writing this, wearing six layers and a hot water bottle at my back and counter to what my fingers, toes and nose are telling me…

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Word reached me this week that the man who’d made my life hell for the final year running Verde and finally forced me out of the walled garden, had gone. The unexpected news left me blank and I know from experience that’s not a …

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