tiny happy

Over the summer holiday, we spent a day at my sister's farmlet, an hour's drive away from town. Her family home is a small wooden cottage that was a public-school-dental-clinic in a former life.

Together with her husband and four daughters, she takes care of a wide variety of farm animals and birds. She also plays in folk music bands and teaches the violin to local kids. But her garden is the thing I most like to inspect when I visit.

There are always new trees, flowers, shrubs and herbs to ask her about, and she grows them all from cuttings and by collecting heirloom-plant seeds from her friends' gardens. Each season she digs up a new bit of ground to plant things in, so the vegetable patch is a big, wonderful tangle of this and that.