Afterwards, I went upstairs and scrolled through photographs of the garden in the summer on my iPhone. Honestly? I was surprised by how beautiful it looked, this happy tangle of ferocious growth. It held the same sharp, poignant realisation that comes with stumbling across a photograph taken of your younger self: that you were lovely, really, and wholly incapable of accepting it at the time.<\/p>\n
How do you capture the smell of sweet peas in June, or the first hit of Sarcococca in January? <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>Gardens are infamously difficult to document. How do you capture the smell of sweet peas<\/a> in June, or the first hit of Sarcococca<\/a><\/em> in January? Those who work in our cherished historic gardens<\/a> are archaeologists, too, unearthing records of what hardy annual<\/a> was sown decades before in an attempt to capture some of the magic originally grown there.<\/p>\n
And yet, we persist. I take endless photos of the garden, but often wish I\u2019d taken more. Months, seasons later, the unglamorous shots of certain aspects are far more useful than the flattering close-ups of a tulip<\/a> in full swell. It is the context that offers the best comparison.<\/p>\n
Despite being a person who writes about gardening, I am hopeless at keeping a record of it. I long to be the kind of grower who has a dedicated diary,<\/a> filled in each day with the weather and rainfall, of what is growing and what is behind. I have started a couple over the years, but they are never quite particular enough about the details and only, in very boring or floriferous weeks, filled in daily.<\/p>\n
More from Alice Vincent<\/strong><\/p>\n
- Alice Vincent on her first garden<\/a><\/li>\n
- Women are the silent caretakers of the earth: it\u2019s time we told our stories<\/a><\/li>\n
- Rootbound, Rewilding a Life, by Alice Vincent, book review<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>
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\u00a9 Camilla Jorvad<\/figcaption><\/div><\/div> <\/div> <\/section> I do, however, love reading other people\u2019s. A couple of years ago, I saw Derek Jarman<\/a>\u2019s large, square sketchbooks open in glass cases at an exhibition, his elegantly sloping writing filling the creamy paper without a speck of dirt. I return to Jarman\u2019s diaries often, usually in the form of a battered paperback of Modern Nature.<\/em> He is a brilliant garden diarist: enthusiastic, opinionated, perfectly conscious of the world beyond his garden<\/a> \u2013 which was, of course, boundaried by the horizon.<\/p>\n