How it started…

July 2020

My first Garden Diary entry was in 2013 on my previous website. I wanted to give something back to visitors to my website and it seemed a gentle way to connect to those taking an interest in my work and garden. I enjoyed marking the seasons in words and images and loved receiving feedback from fellow gardeners. Times change though and the rise of social media made me worry that the pages had become irrelevant and anything coming from my pen, spade or paintbrush was just adding to the volume of ‘white noise’ that was invading everyone’s lives.

Towards the end of 2018, overwhelmed and with a growing sense of outrage against disinformation and online abuse I took a step back from the internet altogether.

Now, both the passage of time and the enforced lockdown during the Covid pandemic have given me the breathing space to take a good hard look at everything I do and here we are again - my new website, a 2020 Garden Diary - recording this strangest of years and a bucketful of the first potatoes I’ve ever grown!

I don’t expect anyone to read these pages unless they want to and I continue to feel prickly about Facebook.