Eye feast

May is a fabulous month for colour. I love this time of year, when everything in the garden is so vibrant. When we first moved here, this beech tree was a leggy sapling. Now it is taller than the house, and very nearly as wide. It makes a wonderful backdrop to the garden's diversity of other colour, including the vivid lime green of the magnolia foliage and the delicate creamy-white flowers of the shrub rose.

We feel privileged to live in gorgeous Kent, the Garden of England. I hear that Yorkshire was recently keen to purloin that title, but gerroff, it belongs irrefutably to this south-eastern-most county, the verdant heel of England.