This week I have a favourite Whatsapp message and a favourite email that I’d like to share with you. The whatsapp simply said “WOW” below the image of these sunflowers. I’ve been following the progress of these sunflowers since my mum bought the packet of seeds back in Spring. The seeds were to be a gift. My niece had had a second baby and mum wanted to buy something for the two and a half year old - ‘big sister’. Mum, 95 years old, chose the sunflower seeds and we bought flower pots and compost to complete the gift. The ‘big sister’ has planted, watered and staked, initially with straws, these small seeds with just a little bit of parental help. This week, the WOW Whatsapp arrived with this photograph attached. How exciting; I suspect the plants are taller than the big sister. (A gardener in the making me hopes.)

My favourite email of the week contained this image. It is Mercy and Sam who you will also have met if you have heard the Spider plant episode. They both hold national collections of this wonderful houseplant and sent me this picture because they were at Mercy’s house together for the Plant Heritage Open Day. I love their enthusiasm and knowledge and I’m thrilled that they are going to be writing to Dr Ernst van Jaarsveld the horticulturist from South Africa (also in that episode) who has studied this plant in the wild. I am looking forward in due course to hearing about those conversations.

The link between these two images for me, is that from seeds or seeds of ideas come exciting things. And whether you are 2 and a half years old or 2 and a lot more years - it’s so wonderful to watch things grow and start to flower.

In book news, there was a moment of serendipity. I mentioned last week that I was beginning with This Book is a Plant. I happen to be reading this book in Norway, just inside the Arctic Circle. So to open it and find one of the essays entitled Upirngasaq (Arctic Spring) by Sheila Watt-Cloutier, was timely. I thought I would share with you this quote from the Inuit writer:

“In our language we have no word for ‘nature’, despite our deep affinity with the land, which teaches us how to live in harmony with the natural world. The division the Western world likes to make between ‘man and nature’ is in the traditional Inuit view both foreign and dangerous. In Western thinking, humans are set apart from nature; nature is something to strive against, to conquer, to tame, to exploit or, more benignly, to use for ‘recreation’. By contrast, Inuit place themselves within, not apart, from nature.”