Gardens

 I am awake at 6.30, though to be honest it is as if Piccadilly Circus has been thumping through my room all night.  Yes that little Mollie does like her nightly scampering and sitting on me, and listening to her own voice!

Also my daughter is once again off to Switzerland on a prebooked holiday with Andrew, so they left about 4 0 clock.  It will be more a sightseeing tour for Andrew of the towns down by the lake and of course Chateau de Chillon.  Another member of the family who lives in Switzerland is having a fight with that dreadful creature that stalks our bodies, his operation seems to have been successful, for which we are all grateful.

But what greeted me on the kitchen table this morning as I went down to make the first cup of tea for the day,  Andrew had left me his book on Jarman with photographs by Howard Sooley.

Here I was able to read Jarman's poem as he raged against the AIDS epidemic taking away his friends and in the end himself.  Apparently his last holiday was to Monet's Garden at Giverny. 

I walk in this garden

holding the hands of dead friends.

Old age came quickly for my frosted generation,

Cold, cold cold, they died so silently.

Did the forgotten generations scream,

Or go full of resignation.

Gardens, once planted, wind themselves round your heart, binding themselves like the bindweed we will crossly pull off the hedge.  They demand servitude.  Bring a child up in a garden, and they will remember the sweetness of it all.  The sucking of honey from honeysuckle, the great stiff gladiolas, a fountain of colour, and roses cascading to the ground.  Even now I have sitting on the table beside me William Robinson's great compendium of plants - English Flower Garden.

We drew at school the first flower of the season, the daffodil, with its awkward trumpet shape, the colour a bright yellow, though I have always preferred the gentler cream hues of the narcissus.

So thank you Andrew for laying that book on the table, as I listen to another on my computer.  'Lives Lost' are always a treasure of understanding what has passed before, and to remember humility because we think we are the first to discover a garden.

A garden is often called and seen as paradise.  The word comes from the Greek paradeisos meaning 'Royal (enclosed) Park'  But the word can flutter from Eden to Avalon through a myriad of words.

Jarman also made stone circles as well, he was a beachcomber par excellence. Driftwood, flints, stones and anything that could add to his stony shingle garden he even added words on the side of his house. But not the following part of his poem.

No dragons will spring from these circles, 

These stones will not dance or clap hands

at the solstice.

Beached on the shingle,

They lock up their memories,

Standing like sentinels.