"I was looking at the flower bed by the front door; “That is the whole”, I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower."
Some of my earliest memories are also of the garden in Rosyth belonging to a sturdy house where my parents lived from when I was about 4 years old. One day I remarked to my mother on the way home from school, observing a hawthorn hedge with its writhing branches springing from the earth on the way home: "Mummy, we live in the roots of the world." There was a very large privet hedge in our garden (I was very small at the time, it probably wasn't as huge as I recall) into which I would secretly creep and explore the roots and low branches in the spaces before the leaves grew. I was suddenly aware that the hawthorn had the same low spaces connected directly to the earth.
Virginia Woolf's The Waves left a lasting impression in my mind, I think a revisit is in order (it has been many years since I read the book). Maria Popova's quote got me thinking about combining drawings I made last year from the weird and wonderful Voynich manuscript with my recent ice-inspired sea monsters. They are very rooty looking and make me think of carrots, parsnips, and other root vegetables and flowering herbs.