Category: Garden poetry
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Magic and mountains and cakes….
Once I stayed in a haunted house after a literary festival in Scotland. It was so haunted, in fact, that my friend and I crept out in the very very early morning to drive home through some very remote countryside. We cheered ourselves up imagining a perfect cafe suddenly appearing – warm, with delicious pastries…
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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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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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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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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,…
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Poor Susan and the sounds of the city
This week I was lucky enough to go on a guided walk around the city of London with Rosie from Dotmaker Tours. She was concentrating particularly on the sounds of the city – we walked without talking, just listening (almost too intense, was the verdict), we talked how the city would sound in the future…
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Papermaking in the garden
Back in the summer (remember that far back, when the sun shone and everything?), I went on a day papermaking course at Morley College in London. I was drawn to it by the fact we were going to be using natural plant materials, but what I hadn’t expected was that I would fall in love…
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We wrote a poem on a leaf…
I’m just back from a glorious weekend teaching creative writing with Anna Robertshaw from Freestyle Yoga Project, who was teaching the yoga. Yoga and writing proved a perfect combination, or maybe that was the group who came. Or even the venue, glorious Tilton House, just up the road from the Bloomsbury set’s famous Charleston Farmhouse on…
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What people have been saying about Digging Up Paradise
I’m not always the best person to talk about my own work. To be honest, I tend to say stuff like, ‘Oh, don’t feel you need to buy it…’ or even direct them to someone else’s book about the same subject. So it’s made me laugh, cry and dance to get the blurbs below for…