SWEET WILLIAM

'How is your garden, Mary? Are the pinks true and the sweet williams faithful?'

(Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Mrs Samuel Bowles, August 1861)

Every year I fill the garden with great drifts of these old fashioned flowers grown from seed the previous year and nurtured through the winter. I am passionate about the range of colours, uncharacteristically patient with their biennial nature, and entranced by their sweet, peppery scent. No-one knows for sure how they got their name, but it's believed to be from Prince William, 'Butcher' Cumberland, hence known by some in Scotland as Stinking Billy. A much pleasanter and more plausible explanation is that it is a from the French for 'little eye'.

For reasons unblippable, it looks as though we are about to experience a major shift in our lives to care for a vulnerable person who is very dear to us. Over the past 23 years, since I have lived in this house, the garden has always been where I manage stress and anxiety best - it was especially so today.