extract from Ambush of Young Days by Alison Uttley

The home of my childhood, eternal and green, appears before my inward eye, and I live again in the 

 brightly-coloured circle of hills where I was born.  No matter where I am, I seek unconsciously for resemblances to that beloved spot.  A draught of spring water, an uncut hedgerow, a broken wall, these bring back visions so real that I cannot tell in which life I am living, the present, or the crystal-clear past, when as a child I ran with arms outstretched to catch the wind down the well-known grassy hillsides.

 There are curling hedges which hold protecting arms round odd little fields, and dark lichened stone walls cutting and dividing the green, and everywhere there are woods, beech woods, a flaming fire in the back end of the year, soft as clouds in Spring, oak woods, rough and sturdy, plantations of dark fir and tender larch, and mixed woods of many colours and sounds, sheltering fox and badger, woods full of enchantment.

A portion of that land I know so well that I can see the contours of the hills, the patterns of the fields, the irregularities of the diverse landscape as plainly as if they were painted before me.  I know every flower-filled ditch, leafy hedge-bottom, and daisied bank, better than I know the lines of my own hand, for during all my earliest years my senses had no distractions from the daily scenes of wood and field and hillside.  They became part of me, like the cold air I breathed, and I had no conception of other lands beyond our own farm and its neighbourhood, the country side which filled the crumpled circle of England displayed before my infant eyes.

Diary Entry: Container Planting

I finally finished all the container plantings yesterday - what a chore.  It has taken many hours of my time - plus the expense of filling so many containers.  Homes had to be found for all my impulse buys - when will I ever learn - never, it seems.  Every year it is the same "next year I'm cutting down" I say, and every year I revert back to type - my greed for container planting knows no bounds.  But they do look rather fine don't they.

extract from The Still Point by Amy Sackville

"The butterflies, then, heave and clamber; the bees bustle and hum; Tess is up and prowling, licking the last of a juicy bluebottle from her teeth with luxuriant tongue.  Everywhere the creak and sigh of growing things, of life, but there is only a rumpled blanket, a discarded book, where we left Julia.  The air stirs, lifting the pages until they hesitantly turn; the words grow faint until there is only regret remaining, 'I cannot go on' whispering across the garden, and then the merciful breeze turns on to the ending, where there is only unfilled white."

Lilacs

Lilacs smell like they look.
They could have no other scent of colour, the flower simply smells mauve,
that haunting naïve purple, mysterious and sweet, just this side of decay.
When you think about it, the combination of hue and scent is first correct,
then perfect. ~ J. Carroll