Gardening and Writing
Ever since I was child, I have had a fascination for watching things grow. When I was about ten, I kept glass jars on my windowsill in which I grew peas and watched, mesmerised, as their roots sprouted and spread. I also kept onions in water, much to my mother’s consternation, and observed them sprouting. My mum is a keen gardener and I loved going to nurseries with her as a child to buy flowers and shrubs. I loved the organisational intricacies of gardening – leaving space for a shrub that might spread and a creeper that might climb and not planting this flower with that in case one dwarfed the other. However, I was never really much of a gardener - as a student in the UK, I kept an African Violet called Shamwari, on my windowsill, but it never flowered and my attempts to grow things in pots also invariably met some form of disaster or another. In my novel This September Sun (amaBooks, 2009), the grandmother, Evelyn, is a keen gardener. When she e