It’s funny how few saucy stories I ever hear about gardening, gardeners or gardens. Alan Hollingurst made a brave exception at the Garden Museum Literary Festival at Boughton House last year, going far beyond Come Into the Garden Maud – though that was his riff. A friend said (about this diary) ‘You’re not exactly Pepys, are you? Do you never get up to no good?’ Pepys is outrageous and archaic at the same time. The formula works. In modern words it might just seem smutty. I’ll keep my clean-living image and forget about my circulation figures.
Although this sub-tropical weather does fill the night air with suggestion. The honeysuckle is a devil at double-entendre, the trickle of the fountain is a tickle in the mind, and the scent of roses conjures up kiosks in the gardens awaiting the righteous with their seventy virgins. Balmy evenings à deux have the same dénouement as evenings by the fireside, but balmy evenings alone in the shadows have less predictable outcomes: journeys in imagination, regrets, urges, in random sequence under the noon and stars. Not really stuff for the diary.
