garden

It's lovely how 'garden' is a noun and a verb. I've been watching Monty Don's series 'Around the world in 80 Garden's' and thoroughly enjoying it. He goes from country to country looking at lovely gardens and talking to gardeners, garden historians, garden-lovers and so on. All the gardeners look amazingly healthy and happy - it seems linked to the longevity of their gardening careers. Anyway I think I love it because I realise that I love gardens, love being in them and looking at them and smelling them and taking pictures - really love all that - but I'm not a very keen gardener. I get dejected by forever repotting and throwing away dead plants and stopping small people from ingesting potting mix. For this reason conventional gardening programs leave me cold - because I don't want to 'recreate the look' or find the exact plant for this or that soil. I don't want to hear about root-rot or pruning. I like the colour and feel of gardens, the patterns and textures. I love leaves and flowers. And I like to think about the links between the gardens people have and who they are.

my boy

My boy is asleep in his pushchair next to me as I'm writing. He fell asleep as we walked back from school. He'd got up at 5.15.

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He was a little bit quiet when we dropped Ella at school. He loves having her about all day to mess about with.

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He's two and so lovely. Leans close in to his Dad at the dinner table, head cocked to the side, and asks: "Daddy - 'appy?" "Happy.""Checks with everyone: "Ella - 'appy? Mummy - 'appy?"

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Goes for some big tantrums. "Nooo!" Not this shirt, not those shoes. I WILL lie on the ground and kick my feet and howl.

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Loves cars (dar) and trams (bam). "Mummy! Loooo! Dar!"

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Golden brown ringlet curls. Hair that's never been cut.

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Big brown eyes. Long lashes.

six

Ella turned six last week. There'd been a lot of ongoing discussions about her party (a whole year's worth) but on Thursday we sat down together and had a bit of a planning session about what we'd do. How I love these discussions - a girl after my own heart - a fairy corner, a royal court, a night sky (I found a note she had written on the topic: "moor stuf - wot ubat wee can mac a nyt skuy").

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I suggested some crafty and maybe a few dress-ups, and she came up with the genius suggestion that the kids could make masks and then get dressed up for a Samba parade "like at Womad". Brilliant. And then we thought we'd have a wishing tree - where Ella could attach leaves for each of her party friends and they could attach leaves for her. We did a lot of thoroughly enjoyable preparation - painted party bags, drew a tree, cut and painted leaves, picked glitter and lanterns.

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All of this pretty much worked out - this short sentence underlying a fair amount of activity and chaos and joy and excitement. I thought they might have lost interest, but the kids insisted on a Samba Parade up the street with flags, drums and tinsel. They wanted to go further, but the grown-ups were flagging. Of course I didn't get one photo - too busy banging the drum and tying elastic on masks.

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What a joy to be six.

toot

leaf

I've been reading Keri Smith's two beautiful books (The Guerilla Art Kit and How to be an Explorer of the World). We were inspired to make some leaf sculptures at the Botanic Gardens. Ella also did some 'sap-exploration'- she's deeply interested in tree-sap at the moment - collecting bits of it in pockets and bags. Last time we were at the Botanic gardens we made flower sticks - threading flowers and leaves onto sticks. I'd seen Bhutanese girls from the village of Laya making these in a break from collecting firewood on Tribe.