5th March 2011

I always thought that when I retired I would write a book called The One Day a Year Gardener. When I lived in Newcastle I was just too busy to Garden so once a year, on Easter Monday, whilst everyone else rushed off to the sea-side I spent the day in the garden.

It was a razed earth approach to gardening.

After I had finished there were bare earth beds where before there had been weeds. The grass was cut to within an inch of its life and the trees cut back to the point of no return.

Only Napalm would have made for a more desolate environment.

Yet, within days there were stirrings as nature began its fight back and soon what was brown and bare, was green and fecund, the trees were in leaf and the pear tree flowering. in fact the only real disaster I have to report was the camomile lawn which I managed to destroy with my over enthusiastic approach to clearing the ground.

Today I ventured into a garden which has struggled through a terrible winter I managed to clear much of what has died due to the intense cold and the snow, which thankfully we missed, and was amazed to see that the camomile had survived, it must be a new tough strain of camomile.

These days of course, we recycle, so the green bin was filled to overflowing with dead leaves, dead plants and one small dead bird, although that might have been a cat rather than the weather.

I rather suspect that when we get back from our return visit to Genoa I may need another day to tackle the Ground Elder which is already flexing its considerable muscles and threatening to take over the newly bared ground.

Apparently Ground Elder was first introduced by the Romans as a salad plant, I haven't tried it I must confess and view it as an off comer to these parts, even if it has been here for 2000 years plus.

But of nature's resilience there can be no doubt.

Today's newspapers are full of fascinating stuff, as usual, but perhaps the most fascinating is what is happening in Libya, here a tragedy is unfolding as we watch, but the interconnections, the resignation of the Director of the LSE, the involvement of Blair and Mandelson in bringing Gaddafi in from the cold, Cameron making foreign policy on the hoof, deploying resources that only last week were scrapped in the defence review, the dramatic impact on oil prices that will of course soon be soon on the forecourts and most of all the Libyan people demanding an end to an unpalatable dictatorship and the regime that it has defended so brutally for years.

I suppose my reflections in the garden as I weeded and raked and loaded the recycle bin and planned for tomorrows sermon on the Transfiguration were informed by my strong belief that as T S Eliot ventured, quoting from Julian of Norwich, All will be well, All manner of things will be well. It is so important to view the world positively and to have hope for the future.

Nature is resilient and so are when we embrace the future with a certain optimism born of our faith in what human beings can achieve.