. . . . prompted by all of you and the talk of herbs, roses and plants with previous lives and histories. Mine is much neglected. Partly because of the weather, and partly because of my own inability to see a way to bring it more under control, I have barely been out in it during this holiday except to bring in logs from underneath a tarpaulin near the door, and to fill baskets with what little remains of our winter's supply of turf. We have lots of much larger logs standing stacked in other parts of the garden from where we had the big pine trees felled that were too near the house for safety, but these have been left too long unsplit and are now almost impossible to split with the tools we have available. An axe and a hatchet only.

The garden is a sorry sight. Dead looking sticks and stalks of Jerusalem artichokes that should have been harvested by now, dying remains of bindweed around jaded looking roses and large piles of turf and woodash thrown for convenience around the base of every shrub and tree within easy reach of the door exposed by the now died back undergrowth.

Everywhere around the garden the strong winds and rain have turned it into a cross between a churned up muddy swamp and a littered battered looking space only one step removed from being a field and many steps removed from being a garden. Numerous rugby and footballs cling in the lower shoots of deciduous shrubs, and even windblown evergreens like hebes expose a part deflated Teletubby ball caught in mid flight round the garden. Children's garden chairs and empty and partly torn polystyrene strip containers adorn prickly branches of hawthorns, hollies, pyracanthas and still almost attractive purple branches of too tall cotinus.

Down one side of the house the gravel path, poorly drained and with a leak in the house gutter emptying straight onto it, is matted with creeping grass and flooded in part, only occasionally revealing that it is even meant to be gravel. Alongside it, the turf lined raised bed built originally as a compost heap and now in its third life after a single season coming out as a successful courgette bed, reaching the end of its usefulness as a home for much neglected asparagus plants. Only one tall feathery plume, bowed almost horizontal by the wind shows where a single resilient asparagus, king of vegetables, survives the onslaught of weeds that has been consolidating its presence for a number of years. The common thyme rolling in a clump over the front of the turf wall is leggy and more fine woody stalks than tiny green scented heads, but still gives a whiff of its potential as it gets a quick haircut as its contribution to tonights pork roast. To the back of the bed, an overgrown honeysuckle gamely outnumbers the bramble nettle and giant hogweed tangle before it falls over the stone wall into the eight foot wide length of field which runs alongside with pretensions to be a future driveway to a newly extended house. Ground covering chickweed, forget me nots and mosses cover the first shoots of daffodils crawling from their deep cover at the front of the bed to make a show some time in the future grim months of february and march.

Next comes the sorry looking sight of the queen of vegetables, the cluster of silvery grey serrated and pointy furry leaves of globe artichokes separated from their parent and placed here in a drill bed which once long ago had probably had more conventional vegetables such as potatoes grown in it. Weeds proliferate here too, disguising the boundary between paths and raised bed, only the difference in height pointing to any level of cultivation. The same interconnected ground cover, linked by the frightening chain of expansion of creeping buttercup moves on into a drill occupied by innocuous looking but valuable stalks which in spring will shoot into new fruits of red white and black currants and rasberries some of which may just provide enough for a family summer pudding before the birds have their fill.

Flat leaved and curly parslies, cuttings from rosemary plants that have taken but not been removed and more clumps of thyme cluster in and out of the drills while a stubborn bronze fennel has seeded itself right in the middle of the gravel path and I havent had the heart to dig up yet. I pass another plot with unharvested jerusalem artichokes and an entire nursery bed of cuttings, which having been taken some years ago and not moved on into permanent positions now constitute a haphazard windbreak of different sorts of escallonias, wiegelias, hebes and senecios which are now some five foot high and may never move expect to go to the shredder or compost heap.

The cold frame by the old shed door depresses me even more and I quickly rush on round the back to my passably usable herb garden where giant sage bushes thrive in the most exposed part of the garden and a large wet bonfire piled high with thinned tree cuttings and reminding us of our recent loss, our dogs wicker basket lies entangled in the heap waiting for a period of dry sufficient for us to light a bonfire.

Ann