Solstice

Below, a lily on the terrace, looking a little supercilious. It's going to be pretty.

Pretty is underrated, you know. That was a whole tangent of a conversation this morning on site, between an architect, her two clients and me, about whether to have flowers or not. The architect was leaning against pretty. Also against anything variegated. Hm - Gerard Manley Hopkins*. The quiet wife whose house it is, wanted lots of flowering plants, I knew. The husband was wanting roses but also wanted to appear cool. We reached a happy medium. It's going to be a nice garden, just round the corner from me, on Baltic. On either side of the property, their neighbours are growing string beans, garlic chives, and have cherries heavy with fruit.

While we are getting on, or not getting on, with our varied lives - happy, sad, doomed, promising, exciting, drab, stressed, inspiring, regretted, habitual, the fig is growing.

* Pied Beauty - Gerard Manley Hopkins

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.