Kia ora Koutou, thanks to the angel who keeps my garden weed free I have some pansy plants and other delights which will bloom in spring…I tried staked tomatoes last year (having always planted the ground hugging ones before) and they were great and fruitful so I might put some more in this season. I remember that In 1924 Ursula Bethell, with her partner Effie Pollen, started their garden at Rise Cottage, Christchurch. Ursula began writing poems when she was fifty and her first collection was published the year I was born, 1929, but I didn’t read it till many years later. I didn’t read any poems written by women and especially not by women who lived in this country.

When I went to school we were taught The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes and we had to learn all 17 (or was it 19?) verses which we chanted in a singsong kind of way, terrified that if we forgot a line or a word the whole class would have to go back to the beginning and start again. I had a good memory and a sense of rhythm and The Highway man is a dramatic story so it was easy — there were these characters — the Highwayman, the Landlord’s daughter Bess, the soldiers who tied a rifle to her breast so that if she called out a warning the gun would go off…and of course, of course, Bess, with her long dark hair, called out a warning, the gun went off, the highwayman was warned and galloped away safe…and then…and then …he discovers that the beautiful Bess has died to warn him and he goes back in an agony of pain and disbelief shouting a curse to the sky and gets shot down like a dog on the highway…a bunch of lace at his throat…

And still on a winter’s night they say
When the wind is in the trees
And the moon is a ghostly galleon
Tossed upon cloudy seas

along comes the ghost of the highwayman…riding, riding, riding…

I loved every melodramatic line of it. No wonder I had a Mills & Boon phase when I was 12. I used to read them so fast, finish, start the next, read that, finish, on to the next… and then one day that phase stopped. Like when you eat great wedges of Coconut Ice, one after the other, there came a moment when I knew that if I ate/read one more M&B I would be sick, so I stopped.

Many years later when I began reading poems written by poets who lived in this country they were mainly by men. I didn’t find Ursula’s until the 1970s, forty or so years after that first collection was published.

‘Established’ is a good word, much used in garden books.
‘The plant, when established’
Oh, become established quickly quickly, garden
for I am fugitive, I am very fugitive….

I think of these lines every time I plant something, and then there’s the huge excitement when a seed I’ve planted shows its green tip, or the plant that someone else has planted stretches out another leaf or bud.
Oh become established quickly… quickly

Renée