Judith is home and working hard to bring normality back, more or less. She is adapting really quickly to her blindness as long as she is in the house and garden. She is even back to working in her garden, having worked out that she can do it by feel and smell. Watching her at work made me think of a rather lovely piece she wrote before having to go into hospital and I would like to share it with you all here:

"As spring starts to roll into summer it is a natural wonder that the tripping of the sun past the equinox triggers this incredible burst of life into the world, a few degrees of inclination in the planet and life leaps and bust forth in a torrent of passion, how utterly wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

I have always thought that gardens are sex made manifest, on a warm early summers night gardens are passionate and hot lovers who assault all of our senses in a frenzied bid to ravish us. I can almost feel myself being flung against the cool stone garden walls as Flora and Fauna’s delicate fingers insinuate their way under the soft linens of my dress and caress my bare skin trying to tease fertile arousal from me. As I walk the garden’s borders in the dark I feel the soft breath of Crown Imperials and Fox Gloves on my neck as the vanilla scent of clematis kisses me behind my ears, melting me, making my knees weak and my belly tingle.

We mammals have legs, we can move in order to seduce, but flowers, plants and vines are rooted, literally, to the spot so for them their seduction has to be done through messages in the air, signaling to each other, entrapping us as unwitting eavesdroppers on their whispers of love. Messages of seduction, messages of love, messages of passion and sex. All of life is a love affair, the urge to reproduce, to copulate and blossom does not discriminate. Gardens are lovers to anyone who walks through them, their smell intoxicates and seduces.

As I meander through my paradise I think of Primavera, that beautiful painting by Botticelli of spring. Venus, precious and beautiful Venus is standing in the centre of the picture, set slightly back from the other figures. The Charites, also called Three Graces, are elegantly dancing a rondel. The garden of Venus, goddess of love, is guarded on the left by Mercury. The myrtle plant that surrounds her is a plant that represents sexual desire, marriage, and child bearing. From the right, Zephyrus, the god of the winds, is forcefully pushing his way in, in pursuit of the nearly naked nymph Chloris clad only in a diaphanous gown. Chloris gave her name to chloriphil, the substance that gives all plants their green colour. Next to her walks Flora, the goddess of spring, who is scattering flowers. Flora tells how she was once the nymph Chloris herself, and breathes out flowers as she does so. Aroused to a terrible fiery passion by her beauty, Zephyr, the god of the wind, follows Chloris and forcefully takes her as his wife, raping her. Regretting his violence, he transforms her into Flora. He makes his gift of contrition to her a beautiful garden in which eternal spring reigns. The painting actually depicts the two separate moments in the narrative, the erotic pursuit of Chloris by Zephyr and her subsequent transformation into Flora. She is beautiful with a rich flower garland on her head and delicate spring blooms erupting from her dress, arms full of flowers. Chloris/Flora, nymph, lover, mother, giver of life, force of nature. I would love to be Flora.

One summer when I was in my very early teens I was in my grandmother’s sprawling garden. As we wondered arm in arm down her rose tunnel her lovely, lyrical, aging voice spoke a verse I had never heard before…..

“Spring-time and Venus come, And Venus’ boy, the winged harbinger, steps on before, And hard on Zephyr’s foot-prints Mother Flora, Sprinkling the ways before them, filleth all, With colours and with odours excellent.”

She lent down to me and told me that some of her best times with lovers had been in gardens. My Oma was famous for the long string of male and female lovers she had had in her life. Amidst stories of some of her lovers I found I was seduced by her garden, it was the first time but not the last, I have been a prolific lover of gardens ever since. In my time I have flitted from one garden to the next enjoying every brief liaison, and in some I have even indulged my own passions and lusts and given myself over freely to the botanical and the human delights with equal abandon.

But this night I was wondering through my garden as I often do on summer nights, naked. I had shrugged my nightshirt off my shoulders as I left the hardness of wooden deck and stepped onto the cool grass. As my feet touched down on the soft, cool carpet of grass the first caress of the garden came and touched my feet, tickling little teases of grass between my toes, cool and soothing. Away from the house lights I was now blind but it did not matter, I know my garden so well I do not need my now failing eye sight, I fancied I could almost navigate by smell alone. Turn left, ah yes, there is the clematis along the Roman wall, turn right the first burst of early Honeysuckle by the first border. I turn right to walk alongside the big stone and flint wall and my guide dog Sissi though will not let me be out alone and walks past me brushing my leg just enough to tell me; “I am here, I am watching, call if you need me” as she wanders off to take her own pleasure in the garden’s scents. Imagine if I had a dog’s nose, how wondrous my garden would seem then. I could smell every tiny little bud, every mote of soil. I wondered if she could smell ladybirds, do caterpillars have a smell ? Does she see the smells of my garden as a haze of intermixing colours in the air? One thing was certain, she must be able to smell the wild garlic I sow in the borders to keep pests at bay.

The air of the night wrapped itself about my naked body pushing away the fog of the warm indoors and breathing freshness over every part of me with a kiss as sexy as any lovers kiss. Just as with a lover’s kiss this one also swelled my breasts and firmed my nipples sending an electric tickle down into my belly. As I walked by memory I marvelled at how well I could move about despite not being able to see. Under foot I could tell where I was on the grass paths by the feel under my feet and by reaching out I could feel by the plants location where I was placed. Fox gloves came to my hands, their tall bell like structures filling my hands so I had to be alongside the wall. I love to feel for the separate little fox bells in my fingers and feel their delicate little structure.

Then I turned towards the long wildflower grass and stepped lightly into the patch and enjoyed the caressing of thigh high grasses and wild flowers. As I pushed through the light sea of grasses as the lush smell of them washed about me, and all over my thighs delicate thin fingers tested and teased their way up. I bent forward and pushed my hands down into the gently rolling surf of grass and meadow flowers, the little strands and stalks between my fingers, crisp tight heads of grasses popping past me. The swaying heads played against my breasts, naughty little fingers reaching up to tickle and tease until I felt the familiar warmth of milk starting to let down inside them. It feels like grass and meadow flowers are growing out of my legs, as though I am becoming Flora, how wonderful would that be, to breath out sapphire cornflower heads and golden Marigolds, sowing my garden afresh with each exhalation

Then Sissi has circled back to me and pushed her muzzle into my right hand, the message for me to look about and pay attention. I looked.

I cannot see detail in such darkness any more but I can see shapes and coming towards me siloetted against the light from the house was a very familiar shape indeed. My very own Chloris clad in a diaphanous gown of fine white linen. I could make out the roll of her hips, that gentle swaying saunter she has that exudes sensuous sexuality. Wading through the floral surf she reached out and put her hands onto my hips and pulled us together. I smiled to myself as I realised her scent was “Flowers’ a vivid mix of Jasmine, sweet pea and rose. I reached under the edge of her nightshirt and traced her nakedness underneath with my fingers, from the smoothness of her thighs, across the curves of her waist and across the flatness of her belly. Exactly a year before that same belly had been great with child, from womb to home our baby now slept soundly while we reconnected with each other and with the nature in our garden.

I un-did the buttons on her shirt and pushed it off her shoulders. As it dropped to form a white pool amid the darkness of the grass about her feet I stepped back . Chloris naked before me. She took my arm and we walked the night time paths of our garden past Amethyst, Summer Sorbet, Wisteria and Akebia. Come sunrise the amazing dance of life in the garden would continue. The reproductive structures of the flowers and plants form pistils. The stigma at the top of the pistil would go back to catching pollen so that sperm from the pollen will travel down this tube to the ovules. The ovules, or eggs, in the ovary are then fertilized, in short, sex.

Gardens are definitely sex made manifest, wonderful fertility and pulsing with life. So one night this summer take your lover out into a garden, walk naked together and really feel the magical dance that goes on all around you. Close your eyes and let it soak through your senses to warm and arouse you and then…………………….celebrate life !

Author: Judith."

I love how so writes, how her words grab me by my senses and take me into the scene with her. I think tonight, at the end of this hot sultry summers night I will take her back into the garden at midnight and celebrate life all over again.

Nina