It is often the play of light or the surprise of scent that triggers moments of real rapture in the garden; surges of feeling that go beyond the pleasures and satisfaction of growing plants.
I just had a moment of raspberry rapture. This season has been perfect for them. I have never seen such a crop on our tall-growing canes. Lashings of gentle rain after the three month drought seems to be a perfect recipe – and picking raspberries in the rain may be a perverse sort of pleasure, but it has an appropriately Scottish feel.
Suddenly at nine in the evening of the longest day, while I in my Barbour was deep in the leaves, plunging to the heart of the bushes for the ripest fruit, the sun broke from the clouds and the raspberries became gleaming jewels among jade leaves. I felt elevated to a gardening nirvana, my senses (my mouth, too) overflowing with the purest pleasure.
