Very Important Places.

This is the place where I last sat with a dear friend. Quite recently. Now it will be enshrined in memory.

Many others will sit here, and we will have afternoon tea, as we did then. Tiered cake-stand in fine bone china, patterned most appropriately with forget-me-not flowers. Home-made cakes and scones, of course. Cucumber sandwiches, of course, and there will be honey still for tea, but I doubt if anyone else will make a special request for sticky jam sandwiches. I doubt if anyone else could face death with such bravery, compassion and thought for others. Forget-me-not.

This is the place where people can walk into a new section of garden, cool, quiet, fern-filled. Soon there will be a special table for outdoor meals (as well as for me to do a bit of potting up). Children will need to watch out for frogs and possibly trolls under the bridge. But the trolls will have to be small, and certainly not of the breed found on the internet. The lower support rail of the bridge is formed from the adventurous and successful growing of a giant Echium last year in my front garden. I was so proud of it. It reached my bedroom window with its great spire of bee-filled blue flowers. It eventually blew down in a gale, and the stem was like a tree-trunk. I couldn't bear to throw it away. So it was incorporated into the bridge.

The small ginger curly head crossing the bridge is not a grandchild, but a very charming poodle visitor who has just been on holiday here and approves of the garden.

                                                                               

This is the place where my husband created a door many years ago. The door is  still there, but the summerhouse that surrounded it has gone. It's a suitably eccentric door with glass panels, one of them painted by our son. The door opens on to a totally overgrown and inaccessible railway embankment, but my husband fixed a 'Private' notice on the outside just in case (or perhaps because he had it and needed to fix it somewhere). It's all still there.

I found it difficult to lose the hard work my husband put into creating the summerhouse. But it had to go. The door didn't.

 Every garden needs a door into another secret garden.

This is the place for a different sort of door - a fairy door of course, with solar-powered lighting and a staircase inside the opening door. It's positioned so that it may be checked at night from the bedroom where the fairy-watchers sleep. It has been built into the dry-stone walling by the team of stone-masons who did the garden reconstruction work recently, as was the very rustic bridge, created from special timbers. They seemed to quite like it, but they could just have been humouring me.

The fairy-watchers haven't found it yet. I hope they haven't already out-grown it. 

The garden will grow, new memories will be created.

But old ones will be treasured, as will the people who created them.

Special thanks to my bridesmaid of some decades ago, Hellen, who took the photos when I wasn't looking.