Stanley Crawford quotes:

Often he vanished for days down the spiral staircase into the engine-room to overhaul the weary machinery, leaving me with a curt note tacked to his then-favourite aspen, the Aspen Laura-Anne, a white-limbed thing with noisy leaves: 'A due-south drift, please, love, for a day or two, n'est-ce pas?

Next to blood relationships, come water relationships.

To dream a garden and then to plant it is an act of independence and even defiance to the greater world.

I was a new writer and I was supposed to write all the time, wasn't I? I had not yet discovered that there are times when one can't write, one shouldn't write, times for thought, for deepening, or just reading, or simply living.

Perhaps it was Maggie, perhaps not. In solitary moments magpies will perch on a branch and mutter soft soliloquies of whines and squeals and chatterings, oblivious to what goes on around them. It is one of those things, I suppose, intelligence now and then does, must in fact now and then do, must think, must play, must imagine, must talk to itself. ... What, finally, intelligence could be for: finding your way back.

There is always something rough and tumble about planting - because with our clumsy implements we must reach from our atmospheric element down into another, down into the darkness of the soil.

Winter is the time of promise because there is so little to do - or because you can now and then permit yourself the luxury of thinking so.