I wasn’t entirely happy with May. 

I’m sorry, Paul, but I think the four words that most frequently enter my head are probably, “I love my garden”.

March 2020. Where to begin?  I’ve been wondering that for a couple of weeks now, hence my tardiness in writing.

It’s been a quiet month in the garden. 

I have always thought there is little redeeming about November in the UK. Grey, soggy, dark, mucky, damp and dreary. Ugh. Everything is mushy, everything has a film of dirt over it and by about three o’clock you’re needing to reach for the lights.

I’ve always loved problem solving. In my first job, making McVities’ biscuits, my colleagues and I spent hour after hour, day after day, looking for ways to eke out a few more perfect biscuits every hour, motivated by the drive to please our wonderful biscuit-eating customers; oh and to avoid the particularly unpleasant experience of having to admit to 10% waste at the ops meeting the following day. 

In this new world of all things Instagram, I’ve become a little jaded with photography. I feel we’ve had photography overload: everyone taking the same style of photo of the same types of things, all designed to make something look better than it really is: more beautiful, more fun, more adventurous than reality. It’s all a bit fake, a bit stylised and really somewhat clichéd.

August is a funny old month. I’ve always thought of it as being the absolute peak of summer: the UK’s warmest temperatures, a full month of school summer holidays and gardens at their most fully grown, exuberant selves.

I remember an incredibly strong feeling of emptiness come over me during May 2018. It was the twelfth month at our new home and for every one of those twelve wonderful months, new, extraordinary and beautiful surprises had greeted us in the garden almost every day. 

It all kicked off at the beginning of June. Of course, I should have realised. I’d mentioned in May that the sheep hadn’t yet begun their Houdini acts, but I also mentioned how dry the ground was. And sillily didn’t put two and two together.