Pursuits

Pursuits

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GARDENING

DAVID WHEELER

IN THE NIGHT GARDEN

Midnight. A three-quarters moon. A gibbous moon, thinly veiled under a gossamer haze. Further south, on the horizon, cauliflower clouds drift eastwards to worry the Cotswolds – no threat to my nocturnal plan. It’s high summer, 18°C (65°F) and balmy, yet fresh.

I was in bed by 9.30pm (listening to Chopin), daylight barely diminished, the alarm set for two hours thence. I slept until the alarm squeaks woke me; the CD long since stopped, the moon riding high.

Drained of colour, the landscape portrayed itself in keen monochromatic tones. Moonlight lacks the intensity for our eyes’ cones to see colour properly; the rods that see shapes instead of colours work with very low light intensities compared with the cones. Hence moonlight’s near black-and-white affect.

Owls. I dress and pull on warmer clothes than I really need in the expectation of an hour’s foray around our five-acre woodland garden.

Mad? No. I’m off to rehearse my olfactory skills. Just me, the owls, flitting bats and flurries of pollinating moths.

My fragrance guru is Stephen Lacey, whose Companion to Scented Plants (2014) is among my library indispensables. More recently, and more relevant to these scribblings, I discovered American horticulturist Peter Loewer, whose earlier (1993) book The Evening Garden has prompted several after-dark meanderings. Subtitled Flowers and Fragrance from Dusk till Dawn, it’s written for the curious, like me, and for ‘the many people who work and only have time to … enjoy their gardens after the daylight hours’.