The Journal

There it was!

On the top shelf at the back of a stationers from another era, off the beaten track in a small Greek town. Outdated and forgotten, was a sturdy hard back business accounts book. This was not an exercise book for random notes. The pages were bound and not disposable. It demanded a serious purpose. It was an important book.

Back home, I felt intimidated by its air of permanence, and for a while I pretended it wasn’t on my shelf demanding attention. One day I was trawling through sheets of paper in an old file full of old garden notes for a project I was working on. It was great to re-read them because they were a true record of spontaneous experiences.Some of the loose pages were neatly ordered and dated, some lists of which plants looked good when, or ideas for future projects. Others were just scribbly jottings written in the wobbly hand that only obsessive gardeners develop after a day when the weather is perfect and they don’t know when to call it quits.

I had found a purpose for my large important book. It would contain all these writings, and I could add to them when I wanted to. I had no hard and fast rules no impossible targets, no ambition to write daily or even weekly.

My life was busy and there was little continuity in my writings. Some whole years were missed out. That was okay in that they were glimpses of a specific time. Reading them brings that moment back to me with clarity or surprise or bewilderment or wonder that we had so much energy.

In the midst of my jottings I found this:
2008.
“The garden here has a real magic. It’s an experience beyond photographs, writing or art. It has a real intensity for me that I know I will never be able to replace, recapture or recreate. When times have been very bad, the garden has been my salvation, my entire world. I want to write as much as I can so nothing is lost. So when I leave here in the future I can read this and be here again in that precise moment. It is a huge luxury to have all this secret space to observe and enjoy. It is a garden we have created with very little money but with many years of hard work and patience and vision.

One day we will be somewhere else. A different location.
Change is good – but not yet.