The soft smell of Spring...........

 It rained yesterday, soft rain, that penetrates the earth.   As I walked the garden, I took in the fragrance of rain hitting dry earth...........

 One of my favourite books is the Moorville Hours by Katherine Swift.     Lets take a brief stroll around the garden, along with an extract from the book.

 Even the rain smells different.   April is the month of sunshine and showers, rainbows and reflections, of small, puffy white fair-weather cumuli which bubble up into cauliflower-headed cumuli congesti behind your back and take you by surprise.

 Intent upon some late pruning, I hear the rain before I see it, rattling on the leaves in a rising wind.   'Only a shower', we say sniffing the air.    And it is gone, as quickly as it came, with ragged fragments of sky left in the puddles on the drive and a glaze of silver on the rose leaves.

 Falling from high altitude, short and sharp and heavy, the rain brings a whiff of ozone from the upper air, a hint of the sea; soon over, unlike the steady downpour of February.

 Indoors a shaft of sunlight is reflected from the bevelled edge of a mirror and shatters into pieces on the floor: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

A rainbow spans the valley, one foot on Shirlett, and other on Meadowley: Iris, messenger of the gods.   She bore a child of the rainbow, fathered by Zebhyrus, the West wind.

For it is - of course - a love affair, this passion for one's garden, and the very smell of it intoxicates, like the smell of a lover.


I leave you with that thought.....happy gardening :)