I've been tagged ...

Leslie of Growing a Garden in Davis has tagged me to write eight things that I'm make me happy. So here goes. I've decided to leave out the personal stuff - if I gushed too much my son would die of embarassment; if I didn't my husband would divorce me. I'll concentrate instead on gardening.

1. Early mornings in spring when I rush out on the balcony and find that my seeds have germinated overnight and are poking their little heads through the soil.

2. Finding new plants that I've never seen before - like my monster from the last post.

3. Sitting on the balcony eating cornflakes at about five in the morning in the middle of summer, the only time of the whole day when the temperature and the humidity are bearable, listening to the dawn chorus and looking at my plants with no-one to disturb me.

4. That day in June when suddenly everything is in flower and looking its best.

5. Neighbours saying "How do you manage to have such a lovely balcony?" (OK, not the most noble of the things on the list, but a least you know I'm being honest.)

6. The fact that when I've seen seed pods or plants I'd like a cutting of in other people's gardens, and asked if I can take them, no-one has ever, ever said no or been in any way offended. On the contrary, it's usually meant spending the next twenty minutes having a guided tour of the garden chatting about where they got the plant, how it's performed for them, what else they've got in their garden - and being offered four or five more things that I'd not even seen from the road.

7. Seeing plants which I've brought from my London garden, either as seeds or cuttings, growing on the balcony. And, when I go to London, taking seeds and cuttings from the balcony to plant there. It makes me feel constantly connected to both places.

8. Sunday mornings, which is the time I work on most of the "maintenance" jobs - deadheading, repotting and so on. After I've been out on the balcony about half an hour, I'm suddenly relaxed, destressed and yet concentrated to an extent that doesn't happen much at other times.

9. In winter, looking back through my photos at flowers from previous years and seeing ones I'd forgotten about - like the one in the photo above

Wow - that's nine and it was only supposed to be eight. When I started writing I'd only come up with three, and thought I'd probably be giving up before the end. But now the part I don't like which is having to tag other people. Perhaps we should all put a section in our sidebar saying I love (or hate) being tagged. So I'm not going to - instead, if as you've been reading through this you've thought Yes, me too, then consider yourself tagged. You can start with the common feature and then add seven more - we'll turn it into a chain meme. If you decide to, leave me a comment and I'll come and find out what we have in common.

And now I'm heading over to May Dreams Gardens. Carol posted on this theme several days ago, but I've purposely been putting off reading the post so that I wouldn't be influenced by her ideas when I finally got round to writing this. We shall see if there's anything we share...