Shouldn’t you be weeding something? I know I should be, but here we are, connected by a love of plants and books. They distract me from worldly tasks and enrich all my endeavours in equal measure. I’d like to share my successes and failures as I gardened my way through countries and continents before recently planting my roots in my forever Exmoor home. I’ll also share what I’m reading. Spoiler alert: not everything I read is about gardens, though location is often a driving force behind my book choices.
I wasn’t born a gardener. Enjoying a childhood in a chocolate box village full of hollyhocks and helping Dad water the veggies (typically under duress as it took me away from my horses) does not a gardener make. No, I matured into a gardener, thousands of miles away from the village of my birth. I’m a gardener honed by the seemingly incompatible qualities of wanderlust and hiraeth, travel bugs and homesickness. I’ve practiced plant craft in the deserts of California, the extreme humidity of Connecticut, and the bitter cold that constitutes the six months of winter in Wisconsin. I’ve fought off hungry goats destroying window boxes in France. In-between I’ve nurtured pots on gangplanks leading onto private yachts (often watered by beer as guests left the cruise) and planters on balconies of rented New England flats. Now, finally, rich Exmoor soil reminds me why I consider Old England the best place in the world to dig a garden hole.
I won’t inundate your inbox as that would take too much time away from my other writing commitments, my weeding, and my reading. I also won’t promise you expert advice. I’ve made too many errors in plant choices to do that! But I hope we can swap virtual plant cuttings and share a good book or two from a bench under a rose scrambling through the branches of an old Amelanchier tree.
Welcome! I’ll put the kettle on.
Tracey