It’s Sunday, not Friday. I had a tooth out on Friday and forgot all about blogging, and then yesterday I was suddenly a gardener, and forgot again. Today it feels too late, but the missing feeling in me feels greater, so here it is. Suddenly remembering that I’m a gardener yesterday was fun. Of course I hadn’t forgotten, but the winter is long, and I never seem to do all the winter things until, well, yesterday. It all started with a growing light that was advertised on our community group, free to collect. Oh yes, I thought, just what I need. It isn’t really just what I need, but it has served a purpose. I have begun to clear out and clean up the greenhouse ready for seed sowing, and I have set up the growing light over one of my propagators. I managed to grow seeds quite well last year without it, but you know, it’s new!

It’s set me up for the new season, that’s really the thing. I sought out some of my saved seed and found that the tomato seed I saved are a bit mouldy. They might still be all right, but just in case I ordered fresh seed from my favourite seed supplier, Real Seeds. They had both varieties I needed, and I ordered one or two other things as well. Also I found a timer to turn the growing light on and off. I didn’t know how it worked so I took a google picture of it and up came the instructions. New world magic.

The next part of this blog is something of a departure. I’m trying to write a month by month account of my gardening year, and what follows will be the sort of thing I’m trying to do. It’s a word description of almond blossom, and if anybody feels like commenting, I would be happy to hear your comments.

Almond blossom

I have beside me in a jar on my table a sprig, a twig from the almond tree. In water. When I brought it in it had a string of buds, green and brown, with a nib of pink poking out here and there, just a nib. I looked at those deep pink nibs and saw written some other beauty, some star, some spring passion. A firmament contained.

Every year I plant broad bean seeds on November the fifth. Every year I know, or don’t know, two things – that nothing can possibly ever emerge from the earth, and that the beans will sprout and grow. There is a certainty in both things.

The journey of the almond blossom is more uncertain. There is the possibility of almonds, and indeed, last year our Christmas cake was decorated with almonds that came from the very same almond tree, arising from flowers that opened at this time a year ago.

At this moment I am not concerned with almonds. I am concerned with one almond flower. It sits beside me on the table, and I have photographed it and there is a huge image of it on the screen above me. How do you look at something so perfect? There are five petals, dusty pale soft pink, and papery. Each one is covered in a mass of shiny striations that glisten, a memory of stardust, of origin, of that nature goddess who presides over all. These petals are just the beginning. They are loosely attached to the calyx, which is green, a wiry glossy spring green on the inside, although I remember a good dark brown on the outside. The part of the petal that attaches is so small, only a touch.

In the centre of each flower is a Medusan scramble of white filaments, each topped with a coral pink anther. In the middle of this jumble there is flat yellow stigma that may sometime later draw in pollen and ferry it down the belly of the flower and form an almond, an almond which may one day decorate our Christmas cake.

One flower, one almond. The green wire in my jar now has five fully open flowers, one half open, two swollen and emerging flowers and four green brown ones with pink nibs ready to write the story.

But all this is only mechanical. The true beauty is in the feeling which is so evanescent, but so precious, so present. Flower fairies and woodland rills, soft touch of a part of me that is delicate and hidden, a whispering, a breath: hidden laughter, sweet smiles, peace. A perfect moment that escapes from the world and exists only in itself, only now.

None of this makes almonds. Almonds will come if the flowers are untroubled by frost and visited by pollinating insects.

But, as Rick said in Casablanca, ‘We will always have Paris.’