Now Mary, how revealing!
Amidst selfish sensuality, I would count things like smiling at the sound of an evening partridge, feeling the pattern of dappled shade on your skin and smelling summer soil after rain. I meant the phrase as an honest, private and unguarded sense of oneself as part of the magical private outdoor world of your own garden. Gardens above all are where you can think most simply about your place in the world, your vegetable-animal-mineral-spiritual content and the sheer pleasure of being alive and intimately connected to a small corner of land with growing and decaying companions.

I think the whole Renaissance Villa movement was based on this idea of clarity of thought through working with land and plants - the straightforward simplicity of Arcadia and the Augustan poets. Didn’t quite have cats, cream and wafers in mind!

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