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.

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.

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.

At the heart of gardening there is a belief in the miraculous.

Surely ruminating and lolling, squandering slivers of time as you ponder on this or that plant; perching about the place on seats chosen for their essential and individual quality, are other whole aspects of being a gardener. Why shouldn't we? We sit in other people's gardens, why not in our own.

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.

There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling.