Green thoughts emerge from some deep source of stillness which the very fact of winter has released.

To be able to walk under the branches of a tree that you have planted is really to feel you have arrived with your garden. So far we are on the way: we can now stand beside ours.

Crouchers move through a garden at a stoop: naming, gasping, horraying, admiring or coveting plants; Gapers saunter, smiling or sighing at what they find, succumbing to an intangible beatitude that takes them for a brief escape into another dimension. Both sorts of gardener are besotted; both get their hands dirty; think and talk gardening; but on the threshold of another's garden, each use a different set of whiskers.

As for garden photographers, how differently they see things. With what ease the camera seems to compose a picture of great beauty with its discriminating lens. The naked eye can't censor some ugly sight on the periphery of vision; the photographer takes the perfect shot and picks for us just what we need to see.

Have you ever noticed how few sitting places you find in private gardens? How seldom the versatility and importance of benches is considered? True gardeners, with their peerless taste, dexterity and inspired planting, never stop . . . To sit is almost an offence, a sign of depravity and an outrage towards every felicitous refinement that has gone into making a garden.

Sitting in your garden is a feat to be worked at with unflagging determination and single-mindedness. . . . I am deeply committed to sitting in the garden.

Green thoughts emerge from some deep source of stillness which the very fact of winter has released.