The Garden at Moorfield Journal: 57

When exploits of late spring in the northern hemisphere, meet deep winter in a garden south of the equator. 17.06.2025

Euphorbia rigida still attempting to flower in the Dry Garden, offering it’s blue and pink relief against the muted winter palette.

I spot the tail of a red paper plane that has crash landed amongst the cookbooks on the second shelf from the top. Too high for the little one who has launched it there to retrieve, so I reach in to remove it (so she’s not tempted to try it herself). I’m already up there, inspecting why my house plants are all yellowing this winter, since I returned home. I pick up the dusky pink ribbed pot that holds a trailing Philodendron and immediately hear the water slosh around, almost spilling it down myself.

In an attempt to keep my much loved indoor plants happy in my absence, everybody who has been here has kindly had a go at watering them. I go through the house and pour the excess off out the nearest doorway and into the sleeping garden, seized by the icy air every time I open the house up to the world outside.

I feel like I’ve been avoiding it. I know I have.

It has taken me weeks to land here again, where my feet feel like they are back on the ground they know. I have been elsewhere, back across the sea in my mind, where I spent the last month, where spring was tipping over into summer and all the countryside and cities alike, pulsed with the vibrancy of plants reaching for their peak and the excitable people who love them. Where ideas flowed like the good wine we drank for lunch and dinner as one does on leave from ones every day life, away long enough, that I found myself beginning to miss my own garden. The demands on my time and my mental space that it makes. I felt the joy again in it being new and unfinished so that I could make the impressions on it the experiences I had had on my adventure, had had on me.

Spot the plane!