Taking the air

Fear less, hope more;  Eat less, chew more;  Whine less, breathe more;  Talk less, say more;  Love more, and all good things will be yours. Swedish Proverb If you don't know this quote already; I hope you love it.  If you do, and like me you've squirrelled it away, now's a good time to get it out, brush it down and learn from it again, methinks. Happy new  year.

There was a tiny bit of white on Christmas morning. You had to look pretty closely, though, and early. Much of Christmas is about perspective, I think, and timing. In terms of frost, the closer you get, the lovelier it becomes.  Don't forget that the frost itself bears gifts. You can't do any actual work in the garden, because it renders things too delicate. Sharp cold kills bugs.  Stare long enough into a frosted hebe and you will banish the ghosts demanding marvellous food and unforgettable experiences. Frost delivers a different picture. It applies icing to edges and replaces colour with sparkle. A  spiky reminder to look closely and well.

I've come to believe that this is the week when 'good enough' trumps perfect. When a shared cup of tea and a proper laugh taste better even than an 11 ingredient Jamie mince pie. The most important thing to remember, I think, is that other people's feelings are probably frazzled too. It's the season to get up early and first. It may be the only time you have to think your own thoughts.  Stand and breath outside, even if only for a few minutes. Cast your emotional anchor. By the time others arise, you'll care less about the state of the living room carpet. Squashed clementines smell quite festive. Nicer than many candles. Find your moments. I've come to believe that friends in sparsely-populated households often appreciate a planned (is it a good time to call?) 15-minute phone call more than another scarf.  Old photos are great too. Dig out one that shows a moment you'd forgotten existed and s lip it into a card. Remember your go...

I never take my phone into the garden unless there’s something I want to photograph. The reception’s rubbish out there and the network non-existent. Thank god. Everyone needs a little freedom of thought. I was pulling ivy off the base of the tree yet again. It’s tenacious, persistent, unremittingly ingenious and resilient. Who wouldn’t want that on their personal statement? What the statement wouldn’t mention is that it needs constant management, without which it will relentlessly make a mess of everything. A nightmare. We all know one of those. Of course it’s beautiful and of course it’s a source of food and cosy habitat. There are moths and bees that like nothing better. I try to focus on that. Wonderful wintery myths and legends are entangled with ivy and holly. In folklore, ivy is said to represent unbreakable friendship, bonds that endure whatever falls into their path. I just don’t want it in my actual path. My holly’s another character altogether. A single t...

Even the beloved goat willow shed most of its leaves last week. If you are very lucky, you will occasionally catch the moment when a tree decides that it’s time to shed and, without wind or trauma, leaves fall around you like huge coloured petals scattered by a giant. ‘Abscission’, a new word for me. Lovely. If I were to launch a new product that was not only staggeringly beautiful but fed insects and made soil, absorbed carbon from the atmosphere while oozing oxygen, we’d all have one. Leaves are a gift and they fall at your feet for free. If you’re lucky enough to have a garden, grab a couple of bin-liners and stuff them full of leaves that have dropped where you don’t want them. They will smell delicious. Take as big an armful as you can manage and breath deep. They will absorb your cares. If the leaves have fallen on flower beds, leave them, it’s where they belong. They’ll have mostly disappeared come the spring. Worms and the weather work hard in the winter. T...

This morning’s southerly would take the skin from your cheeks. Unusual for us. It’s most often the north easterly winds that hurt. Of course, it feels completely painless in one direction, that’s the thing with beach walks. Stride out and you have a salty power source, pushing against the back of your waterproof. It’s when you turn to come back that you realise how far you’ve travelled. There will be a guru somewhere extolling the virtues of salt-water exfoliation. Perhaps you’ll get facial sandblast at the same clinic at a price? This morning’s natural treatments cost nothing and yet I quickly had enough of them. Even the gulls weren’t really bothering to play. The sea remains beautiful, even when it’s cross. The low tide tripping great crashes of water  against the offshore sandbank that’s moved in the space of a week. There’s a scarf of stringy seaweed just above the waterline that goes on for hundreds of yards. I stop and peer at it and am rather embarrassed ...

I was chatting to the man that runs the tree nursery. I was after a couple of roots of copper beech to fill a gap in a hedge. “You’ll find it hard to find copper beech roots in Suffolk now. You don’t see young beech hedges, do you, if you think about it? There’s only the big old ones and they’re quite a rarity. We’re too dry. Too hot and dry. No point in selling them.” Of course he’s right. It was the dry heat of this summer that had cooked the small pieces of hedge in the first place. Although that summer now feels like a lifetime away, in terms of gardening, the ground’s still dry. Last week, I fell for, ‘10 tulip bulbs for a pound’. When it came to putting them in, half a hand-depth down, there’s barely any moisture. The bulbs effectively dropped onto dry earth. I have a good friend that used to live nearby. She’s from the US. Witty, kind and bright, a Wellesley girl, and in the old-school American way, she celebrates the start of each evening with a cocktail. It ...