Category: 2019
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Stepping insideThe Yellowhammer’s Nest
It’s National Poetry Day today – and for this, I wanted to take at least one of our words about nature and its beauty back to where it belongs. I was dismayed recently to search for ‘Yellowhammer’ only to wade through a full page of political jargon before I got to the bird. Really? So…
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Creative Writing Wednesday – week 5. The smellograph…
this is a smellograph, the delicacy of rose surrendering to rain I went out into my garden this morning just after it had finished raining and the smells were delicious. It made me wish I could capture them in the same way I could snap, for example, the photograph this rose above with the raindrops…
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Creative writing exercise, week 4 – writing your own instructions
The late great Toni Morrison famously said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” I like this advice on many levels, but mainly because it deals with the idea that when we are writing, we are also listening to ourselves. Perhaps one…
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Creative Writing exercise, week 3 – listening for inspiration
Shhh… what do you hear? A simple writing prompt for you today – just sit out in the garden (enjoying some sunshine hopefully) and make a list of everything you can hear around you. Write down everything from the van backing in the next road to the grass in the wind. Maybe you’re lucky enough…
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Creative writing in the garden, Week 2
If last week’s prompt was all about memories, this second writing prompt is all about looking forward in time. Imagine it’s some point in the future – five years, ten years, twenty years hence. Now picture yourself in the garden. What do you think that future you think about what you are doing right now?…
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Week 1 of Writing in the Garden – a free creative writing exercise
Hello! I had such a lovely response to my recent article in the RHS Garden magazine on reading and writing poetry that I’ve decided to put a different creative writing exercise up on this website EVERY WEDNESDAY. We’ll see how we get on, but I suspect we will make some poetry and prose creative fire between…
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A Trip to Tropical Tresco
See whatttttt I did there? We’ve just come back from the Isles of Scilly, it was the perfect holiday but interesting how loads of people have heard of them but aren’t quite sure what – and where – they are. And those who have, say ‘ah Tresco,’ as if that’s the key one. Although yes,…
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Why gardeners should read (and write) poetry
It was Cicero who said that if you have a garden and a library you want for nothing, and I’m proud to have an essay in the RHS The Garden magazine about why gardeners should read poetry. It was a joy to share lines of some of my favourite poems in the essay, and if…
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The News From the Garden
is earthshattering, a blackbird’s made its nest in the hawthorn tree, and breaking as I write, seedlings planted a month ago are bursting forth, teasing us with their rainbow hints, but if you rub a leaf between finger and thumb you can smell summer already; a baby is kicking its legs in response at the…
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A garden poem for meditation – walking in Stand Wood above Chatsworth House
We were too early to get into Chatsworth House so walked up to the Hunting Tower in Stand Wood while we waited. It was as if we’d wandered into a magic kingdom, and I suddenly realised how many times I’d walked here before in my imagination during meditation visualisations. Here’s the poem that came from…
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Gods, jade and sulphur – the Diamond Falls Botanical Gardens in St Lucia
Looking out at grey skies today, it’s a joy to go back through posts from just a month ago and pick out ones from our visit to the Botanical Gardens in St Lucia. The gardens from part of the legacy of the Devaux family who owned the land since 1713, and which used to be…
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Snowdrops rising like lanterns
Winter Garden by Sarah Salway Like the pilgrim divests himself of worldly goods, the garden’s stripped back to a skeleton, only the vertebrae of paths holds its truest form and even as trees hold blossom close, buds aching, it’s still the cutting back that matters most, while through it all the river’s artery rolls,…