Not only the sunny hours

   I wrote about Katherine Swift's The Morville Hours: The Story of a Garden earlier in the year, and I enjoyed it so much that this morning I went to hear Katherine talk about the book and the garden she created from nothing at her home in Shropshire. Both have been labours of love, taking years to 'complete' - though as she says, "a garden is a process, not a product" - and reflecting her desire to root herself in one place. I described the book as "The fulfilment of an idealistic, romantic vision grounded in a necessary realism....[it is] at once scholarly, profound, sensitive and beautifully written".
    Looking again at my notes I thought I'd quote a typical passage; as we are in an atypical August, wet, dreary, colourless and dull, I've gone on to September for this one:
"The wound-up watch-spring of summer is winding down. The days fill with rounded golden light, like a rich old Sauternes, full and sweet. Sugars caramelise in the leaves - tones of butterscotch, cinder toffee, treacle tart; quince paste, marmalade, toffee apple; Beaujolais, cassis, Lynch-Bages".

   

     She describes her apples:  "some as gaudy as peacocks.....others, subtle as scholastic philosophers, hide their exquisite flavours beneath dun exteriors", and she muses on using the colour palette of fruits for interior decor - "The bedroom in the deep yellow of ripe quinces, with a bedspread plumply quilted like the dumplinged base of the fruit, folded and tucked as if with the imprint of the cook's thumb, and soft muslin bed-curtains like the white down that coats its ample curves".
    Katherine Swift writes of the importance of really looking at things and of retaining a sense of wonder, and yet her unsentimental, practical side stresses the need to work with what you have. In her garden and in her book she seems to have achieved both.