Dusk is the perfect time to imagine. Hard lines blur and imperfections cease to nag. It is  one of my favourite times in the garden. You can imagine how things will be the next year, when this year’s plantings can be improved.

I took these photos last night. The raging Westerly, which makes life on the very top of Napier Hill miserable at this time of year, had dropped. All was still, and at a certain point, I looked out the window and saw everything had become bathed in the light of a beautiful sunset. The sky shows the clouds which echo the stillness after a storm. The garden became magical. And in that curious way of life seeming like art, the sky became like a Rodney Fumpston print and the objects on red plush seemed to evoke that French painter of eloquent still lives.

Sky a la Fumpston

Stil life a la Chardin

I took these photos in a way to record what it was like having a garden right outside the windows. Douglas and I are contemplating a vast change in the front garden: pushing the border back to the front hedge, so you look into a depth of the border from the house rather than, at the moment – as here – looking into the back of the border.  However, at the moment we do fortunately get a few lovely roses quite close to the glass.

PW