from the editor - St John's Felbridge

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STEPHEN WRITES… DEAR FRIENDS, There is a very powerful description of the ‘last times’ in Paul’s second letter to Timothy. It says that this is what the world will be like: “People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without selfcontrol, brutal, not lovers of the good…” If you were feeling in a pessimistic mood you could say that pretty much sums up our world! There’s certainly a lot of ‘me-first’ around, and money is a very powerful force in many people’s lives… And there isn’t the respect for parents that there used to be… And what about ‘ungrateful’? You are not going to be grateful if you feel the world and other people owe you something. You are not going to be grateful to ‘God’ if you don’t believe there is a God to be grateful to. There’s not much point in being grateful to an impersonal life-force that doesn’t know whether you are being grateful or not! There is so much that we owe him— life itself, for example! All the good things we enjoy in life, the provision for our needs—food, water, a roof over our heads and clothes on our backs. We are conscious that not everybody in the world enjoys these things in such a generous measure as we do. We don’t know why that should be, and we endeavour to do what we can to redress the balance and share things out more fairly, but it does not make us less grateful for all that we have. It makes us all the more grateful that we have been given so much and have entrusted with sufficient resources to be able to help others who do not have what we have. Our annual Harvest Thanksgiving does not have quite the same meaning that it had for our forbears who depended directly for the winter ahead on getting the harvest in—but it is a good focus for expressing our gratitude to God for his generous provision for us. Yours sincerely, But for anyone who does believe in God, surely being grateful is a pretty basic response. 2
IN THE GARDEN THERE ALWAYS comes that one morning when you get up and there is a definite feel of autumn: a chill in the air, an atmosphere, a smell, a mistiness and you know it’s time to start putting the garden to bed for the winter. Now is the time to think about getting tender plants and cuttings into the greenhouse before the first frosts and to mend fences before the October gales and also to think about changes for next year. Our big change is to give up the allotment that we have had for 20 years. We need to cut down our work load and concentrate on the garden. We were producing far too much for two and the family don’t eat beetroot, marrow, broad beans, rhubarb and gooseberries as we do. Therefore, we have dug up a flower bed right at the bottom of the garden and Derek has created a vegetable patch in a raised bed. It is all dug over and composted ready and waiting for next spring. We had a great fruit harvest with a bumper crop of eating and cooking apples and a lovely lot of Victoria plums and damsons with no maggots this year. This was probably due to the fact that in the spirit of ‘belt and braces’ we hung up not one but two pheromone traps. In the flower beds there were, and still are, lots of winners especially the Sidalceas, Penstemons, Japanese anemones, the fuchsia Southern Belle and the Anthemis E.C.Buxton. The newly-planted Thalictrum Hewitts Double was so pretty and abundant and grew to about 6ft. Not quite as good as the specimen in Wakehurst which is about 9ft, but perhaps next year… And we still have all that gorgeous autumn colour. Isn’t it amazing how things just ‘arrive’ in the garden? We had a good clump of Nigella this year which we certainly didn’t plant and although we lost the Cerinthes in the hard winter several seedlings established themselves in the pavement cracks outside! Some while ago an Abutilon arrived out of nowhere and this year a lovely strong seedling of white Buddleia, which we intend to plant in the front garden in place of the very old gnarled blue one. It’s good to make changes and create new displays. I admire the work of Claude Monet, both his paintings and his garden at Giverny, but I love that he referred to his garden as his ‘most beautiful work of art’. Maureen Reynolds 3
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