Wednesday 1
Flowers spring up and entwine themselves like bindweed along the footpaths of my childhood. Most loved were the blue stars of wild forget-me-nots that shimmered in the dark Edwardian shrubberies of my grandmother’s garden. Pristine snowdrops spread out in the welcoming sun - a single crocus, purple among its golden companions. Wild columbine with its flowers shaped like a vertebrae, and the ominous fritillaria that crouched snakelike in corners…
These spring flowers are my first memory, startling discoveries; they shimmered briefly before dying, dividing the enchantment into days and months, like the gong that summoned us to lunch, breaking up my solitude.
The gong brought the pressing necessity of that other world into the garden where I was alone. In that precious time I would stand and watch the garden grow, something imperceptible to my friends. There, in my dreaming, petals would open and close, a rose suddenly fall apart scattering itself across the path, or a tulip lose a single petal, its perfection shattered for ever.
Dusty ivy, spooky with cobwebs - nettles which sprang up with the summer to sting bare knees - I learned to skirt round the deadly nightshade, to view it with grudging respect. But of all plants, dandelions, which bled white when you picked them, filled me with most fear.
But Gran’s garden, in spite of its shadows, was a place of sunlight; no longer cultivated, its herbaceous borders long since softened by invading daisies and buttercups, it was slowly returning to the wild.
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