I'm knee deep in several fiction titles at the moment but not near enough finishing any of them to write about them. In the meantime, I gaze out at our leaf strewn rear lawn and dream of the spring. Actually I like this time of year: the cold keeps the air crisp and there is a particular clarity of the light which is hard to describe. I woke this morning to a powder blue dawn, skeletal trees across the bridle way outlined against the sky, and low lying metal grey-blue clouds on the horizon.

My dreams of the spring are not to hasten it, but are me plotting out the vegetable patch in my head, my future abundant herb garden, banks of wildflowers, the compost heap, and so on...The pleasure is all in drawing out the planning, for which long winter nights and a Persephone notebook are all important, for sketches, and border plans, and my increasingly lengthy list of herbs.

I've just finished STICKY WICKET: Gardening in tune with nature by Pam Lewis which has added greatly to my enthusiasms about our little garden. Of course, down in Dorset she has a much larger property, but there's plenty here for really any sized garden (even a balcony full of pots) because it is her enjoyment of her garden and the ideas she brims with which make for such a satisfying book.

Lewis's focus is on gardening with plants that complement the natural environment and animals. This just so happens to tally with what we are hoping to eventually achieve in our garden and so it is fascinating to read what has worked (and not!) for her. I like her approach:

A wildlife wilderness needs thickets to give cover and, design-wise, to add to the sense that all is not quite revealed, accessible or entirely controlled. I try to enter the mind of a hedgehog, slow-worm, bird or a mouse and think what, for them, would represent a safe, protected environment. For instance, tuckering down or nesting in - or beneath - a tangle of unclipped evergreen privet, a thorny pyracantha or a hawthorn hedge bottom would seem like a snug, safe and private little kingdom (p.152).

What a wonderful concept of both garden and wildlife lurking, in a positive sense, and providing the space to allow that. STICKY WICKET is made up of several interlinked gardens (rather as Sissinghurst flows, I imagine, perhaps incorrectly, but a lot less formally). Lewis covers the creation and construction of each with discussions about how they reached planting decisions, how wildlife has reacted, and her thoughts as the gardens filled out. Accompanying all this are lovely photographs. I highly recommend STICKY WICKET as a gift for any gardener of your acquaintance. It has the added benefit that if they like the book, the gardens for which the book is named are also open to the public - I'm plotting an excursion for next year already!

I loved growing pumpkins when I was small - such satisfying vegetables. Two little leaves would break their way through the soil surface and soon they would be slightly furry, with tendrils stretching for purchase. Inevitably they'd run away, outside the boundaries of the plot. Once (I was six, the same year my brother jumped from the garage roof with a make-shift parachute made from OK Bazaars and Checkers shopping bags) a pumpkin plant I had sown grew up a nearby tree and a grey-white pumpkin grew there, balanced in the branches. I was so proud of that pumpkin.

We have a new garden here in England, and a new vegetable patch. We planted two pumpkin plants this summer and lo and behold they covered the entire patch, climbing along the apricot tree trusses once they'd run out of space on the ground, and weighing down the tomatoes - I didn't have the heart to stop them. The leaves, huge like large lilypads, hid budding treasures and this weekend we harvested and brought in two great orange globes - 10kgs and 7kgs a piece! We'll be eating pumpkin 'til the cows come home, but who cares?! I feel the satisfaction of a six year old.

My brother recently commented that Laura Ingalls Wilder's FARMER BOY was all about food and that you need to eat before you read it, otherwise it will make you hungry. I hadn't remembered that, but recalled instead the dramatic bull-whipping episode in the schoolhouse, giant chunks of ice from the river cut for refrigeration purposes and, of course, Almanzo Wilder entering his milk-fed pumpkin in a contest at the county fair! Feeling self-satisfied about my own pumpkins I went back to check, and so help me there are page after page of Almanzo eating (especially pie, and a lot of it pumpkin pie). Here is a typical description:

Father sat at the head of the table, Mother at the foot. Then they must all bow their heads while Father asked God to bless the food. After that, there was a little pause before Father unfolded his napkin and tucked it in the neckband of his frock.
He began to fill the plates. First he filled Mr Corse's plate. Then Mother's. Then Royal's and Eliza Jane's and Alice's. Then, at last, he filled Almanzo's plate.
'Thank you,' Almanzo said. Those were the only words he was allowed to speak at table. Children must be seen and not heard. Father and Mother and Mr Corse could talk, but Royal and Eliza Jane and Alice and Almanzo must not say a word. Almanzo ate the sweet, mellow baked beans. He ate the bit of salt pork that melted like cream in his mouth. He ate mealy boiled potatoes, with brown ham-gravy. He ate the ham. He bit deep into velvety bread spread with sleek butter, and he ate the crisp golden crust. He demolished a small heap of pale mashed turnips, and a hill of stewed yellow pumpkin. Then he sighed, and tucked his napkin deeper into the neckband of his red waist. And he ate plum preserves, and strawberry jam, and grape jelly, and spiced watermelon-rind pickles. He felt very comfortable inside. Slowly he ate a large piece of pumpkin pie.

I shall have to take down the recipe books. Pumpkin inspired suggestions anyone?

Now that I'm a working-from-home sort of person, part of the morning routine is to wave the giri off to work. The neighbourhood marauding kitties have (of course) figured this out and most mornings there is at least one lying in wait at the front door, desperate to get in. Some mornings there are several, circling like sharks and eyeing each other with fake loathing in a competitive spirit (they know we won't let them all in at once). We have clearly become an extension of "their" humans - scritching and stroking on tap! I have just turfed out an extremely unhappy cat. He came charging in like a small buffalo as soon as we opened the front door, but made the mistake of dashing into the lounge (the sofas are, apparently, great scratch posts). Precisely because of the way he treats the furniture in there, out I threw him, and a very disgruntled cat he is. If looks could kill, I'd be dead.

Autumn is coming. The car in the morning is covered in wet dew and at night there's a chilly crispness to the air. The trees are all still in leaf, which is lovely, but some of the plants are thinking about settling in for winter. Pumpkins in the vegetable patch are huge, and in the borders the fennel is flowering again. One of my great delights this year were artichokes in amongst more formal border plants. Ours were dwarf, so not too big, although they have such spectacularly vibrant purple flowers that I might go slightly overkill next year and grow both dwarf in the border and normal enormous ones amongst the vegetables. We don't actually eat them (although if the harvest was big enough next year, we would), instead we grow them for insects - certainly the butterflies tend to get really excited by both them and the lavender bushes. Apparently they are great overwintering houses for insects so we've left all the brown shrivelled up heads for the moment.

There's still weeding to do . . . there's ALWAYS weeding to do . . .

A magnolia tree waves gently (and temporarily) outside my study window. Temporarily because it is currently living in a wheelbarrow having been rudely excavated from the middle of the back lawn. We are the second owners of a house built immediately after the second world war (the previous owners lived here for fifty years). We were struggling with the 2m x 2m-with-three -doorways kitchen, however, and felt we should extend. The "new" house is lovely, but the garden was trashed while extending and we are in the process of redoing the entire space. A JCB is currently parked on my back lawn-to-be, the greenhouse is adrift and the magnolia is homeless. Should all settle down shortly - I am imagining summer garden party, strawberries, champagne...

I picked up Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness again this afternoon. In the context of the book Francofinn and I am working on it is important, as so many African writers have felt the need to "respond" to it. I'll let you know more once I've reread it, but based on my recollected impressions I do feel it is not about bashing on Africans, but everything to do with reflecting back onto the protagonist and the audience reading the book. Chinua Achebe was all hot and bothered about it, however, and Ngugi wa Thiongo has had a word or two to say on the subject as well, hence the reread in the context of their criticism.

Quite coincidentally, Conrad is buried in the graveyard near our house. Perhaps I shall have to make a mini pilgrimage?