Welcome to the Rose Garden

A summer's storm is breaking all around me, and the air is washed clean with birdsong and with thunder. The garden has long since become Nature's battleground, where the ivy and the rose join forces to contend against the honeysuckle and the clematis for possession of the ruined walls, the sagging trellises and the long-forgotten arbours. Cornflowers, poppies and wild jasmine stretch themselves out languidly upon the earth, overflowing from the hollow shells of former flowerbeds. The brambles and the ferns creep silently through the long, seeding grasses. The rain-soaked air is heavy and fragrant with shimmering, golden drifts of pollen.

I run through the garden, wet through and laughing at the rain, my dripping sunhat in one hand and my eyes constantly distracted by the quivering silver of the sky. The ground is forgiving underfoot but for the occasional thistle clinging to the path, but the long, wet grass lashes at my legs as I push myself on with a dreamer's logic through the fast-falling storm.

Deeper in the garden, I can hear the sound of running water. To my left, the wall is more complete. It holds back a hillside with its stubbornness, but it cannot hold back the silver stream that glimmers and glints in the rain-light, falling over the dust-weathered bricks and into a pool at their feet before weaving its way into the garden. As I cross over a small, red bridge, I can see the tadpoles and the tiny fish that swim and swarm in the water. A heron stands drowsily amidst the reeds and ruined statues, beside a weeping willow tree that sways and sings with windchimes.

The gravel clustered together in the memory of a path cracks like split coals beneath bare feet…

A bullfrog croaks.

The sky above me spiders and trembles with raw lightning.

The rain runs down my spine and makes me shiver.

At the back of the garden are the remains of one final, fast-dissolving wall, and beyond it the ground falls away steeply over rocks and scrub down into a vast valley that waxes moonlight-on-water pale in the rain.

Far, far below, a river slithers through the valley floor, and beyond it, there are small, scattered snatches of woodland and great, smoke-coloured mountains stretching up impossibly high in the rain haze against a storm-wracked sky.

The windchimes shiver…

In the valley, horses shelter from the rain, wrought impossibly tiny by the sheer scale of it all. A whinny catches in the funnel of the mountains and rides the wind up to my garden. That same wind brings with it the smell of the woods and weary mountains: pine needles and leaf litter; gorse and heather and stormfall.

The summerhouse is closer now: a lattice of glass and metal, flowers and paint…

It is time to step out of the rain.