Not seeing is half-believing.

I like owls. I admire their intransigent spirit. I have respected them deeply ever since I met a baby owl in a wood, when it fell over dead, apparently from sheer temper, because I dared to approach it. It defied me first, and then died. I have never forgotten the horror and shame I experienced when that soft fluffy thing (towards which I had nothing but the most humanitarian motives) fell dead from rage at my feet.

The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.

I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. Oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly.You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.

Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.

I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live.

What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful.