Apparently the garden started accidentally, when a piece of driftwood was used to stake a rose. Gradually more pieces of wood and other items were retrieved from the beach and used to support the increasing number of plants, and also to create a form and structure for the garden, which in winter must look very bare. Even now the planting is quite spare and has little colour, apart from a little pink, a few orange Californian poppies and the bright yellow gorse - which is echoed in the yellow window frames of the black timbered cottage:
It's the "found" items from the beach that provide the focal points and exercise the imagination:
On the side of the cottage is part of John Donne's poem The Sun Rising:
Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.
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