My favourite words of the moment are:

Bulb.

Shrub.

Shale.

Love.

and

Alchemy.

Words that sound the most whole, feel the most rounded and give flight to the most expectant of expectations as they come out of our mouths. Words that are onomatopoeic in their creation. They feel, mean and sound as full of their truth, their measure, as full of themselves, as they are so terribly, so beautifully, ordinary in our day-to-day conversations.

So, a book called Bulb will be promising and beautiful, with soft, rounded, tulip-y delights on every page. A book simply titled The Rose, written by THE rose-man, David Austin, has to be absolutely all about roses, and beautiful, so beautiful I'm sure there is a 'scratch and sniff' element in the binding. The Life and Love of Trees similarly, is quite absolutely definitive of our intimate connectedness to trees - even if we don't realise, understand or can't imagine it. From the boreal forest at the edge of the Arctic to rainforests girdling the planet; from giant, unseen, underground life forms to the possibility of life-saving unknown treasures in the high canopies - our life, our need, our love, of trees.

Sissinghurst sounds a little too sharp and sibilant for it's subject matter, one of the oldest estate gardens in England re-designed by the fanciful Vita Sackville-West and now written up as a fascinating history by her grandson, Adam Nicolson, but the story is a joy, a laugh, and an inspiration for the gardening dreamers amongst us. And similarly, Garden of a Lifetime: Dame Elisabeth Murdoch at Cruden Farm is a wonderfully produced history of her garden, with sections originally mapped out by Edna Walling, and followed through over 80 years, by the Dame herself.

But why the words 'shale', 'shrub', 'love' and 'alchemy'? Because of a number of things, but also because of the exquisite and heartbreaking book by Derek Jarman, Derek Jarman's Garden which was the last book he ever published. In it he documents his shingle and shale, lost-and-found garden created in Dungeness on the coast of Kent in England, overlooked by a nuclear power station. His little wooden shack and garden drawn with driftwood were (are) desolate, yes, but this artist, this extraordinary visionary, could find beauty, belonging, purpose and love in places we wouldn't even notice. To hold this book, to think about a life, a rose, a tree, a shrub and love. That is magic, there. True magic.