19. Grape hyacinth

A vibrant blue catches my eye. The grape hyacinths are in bloom, nestling under the daffodils on the steps of the Imbolc garden. Until now spring has been a weaving of yellows and pale green; now threads of blue and purple add the colours of sea and sky.

Grape hyacinths, whose blooms are meant to look like bunches of grapes, remind me of my grandmother. They were her favourite spring flower in her traditional English garden, and she grew them along a short path which she rather grandly called the Spring Walk. She would have been fascinated by Brigit's Garden - and, most of all, by the stone walls.

Living here in the West of Ireland we take stone for granted as it is visible everywhere. In my grandmother's Sussex garden, now my sister's, there is no real stone. There, boundaries are

marked with hedges not walls, and the only hard materials are small flints dug from the nearby chalk.

I  imagine my grandmother strolling through  Brigit's Garden, entranced by the splashes of yellow and green against grey stone, and by the sheer Irishness of it all. And then, perhaps, a vibrant blue would catch her eye too and she would bend down, smiling, greeting the grape hyacinths like an old friend encountered far from home.