This is the Acer that good friends helped me (or rather, I helped them) to re-pot last autumn after one of the storms blew it over and smashed it’s previous pot. It looks as though it’s been in its new position for 20 years and is about 20 feet wide in parts.
This morning I did a lot of tidying up jobs and sat on a bench to admire my work, already quite tired. My eye fell on the old brick path that we laid about 30 years ago and which needs the moss and mud scraping up once a year. Friends are coming from California in 10 days so I thought that I’d just do a tiny bit to show what it would be like when I got round to do the job properly, although the poor, overshadowed lawn will take longer to recover from the winter. Of course, a couple of hours later I’d done the whole job and was completely exhausted. I sat this time with coffee to admire my work, enhanced by the first use of a lovely porcelain mug given to me on Sunday by my ceramic teacher Kyra Cane.
That’s the only ceramic interest in this post, but I thought about what I had just done: how it looks a bit brash although not the perfect job that somebody else might have done. It made me think that until it mellows in a few days it will look a bit self-important and I see the garden as a whole, like a painting or indeed, one of my pots. No particular part should say, “Look! I’m the most important!” Every part should contribute in it’s way, unostentatiously, to the overall effect. I spend ages doing things to make it look as though everything has just happened by chance!