Author: Peter Toon

I started writing regularly on my blog here at the start of lockdown, and posted quite a few reflections on that unique period as my “Diary of an Involuluntary Acolyte. ” I decided to draw that to a close a couple of months ago, and since then my writing has been focussed on exploring “Personal Pleasures”.

I started that here; however this is not really a blog, and so I have decided to move that to my website

https://sites.google.com/site/peterdtoon/

I have posted half a dozen chapters there so far and will continue to add to it there.

The chapers can be downloaded as PDFs from there which are probably easier to read. The only drawback is that comments cannot be posted there; however since 90% of the comments I got here were spam this is not a huge problem. If anyone does want to comment on any of my writing please email me.

I will continue to post occasional thoughts on this blog when this seems the appropriate place to do so.

God Bless

Peter D Ton

I like all flowers, but there is something particularly wonderful about the sunflower. I love to see fields of them in the South of France, rows and rows of yellow faces all lined up with soldiers on parade. I love the way when the sun is the opposite side of the field to you they all turn their backs on you, as if you had said something to offend them.

This year we succeeded in growing a sunflower in our garden. I planted about a dozen seeds from a packet of mixed wild flowers. Three came up, pushing their folded cotylodons through the cold March soil, and then slowly unfolding, getting two proper leaves and starting their long climb upwards. One although healthy has turned out somewhat stunted (or perhaps a different variety) and has only reached 4 feet high, but the two others soared upwards until, when they were about five feet tall, we had an unusually windy day and I found that one I had staked with a 3 foot pole was broken over just below the top of the stake. I was heartbroken, and I added a second bamboo pole to my one remaining successful plant to prevent a repetition of the disaster. Even so things looked uncertain for that when I found it leaning sideways after another gale, but fortunately it was bent but not broken. I put in an even higher and stronger stake – six feet of metal this time – and watched anxiety for signs of wilting. Fortunately none appeared and my survivor continued upwards to over eight feet at which point over a fortnight we watched with fascination as the bud appeared and started to follow the sun round the sky.

It is now in its full glory, the yellow petals flaming out from the dark circle of the centre like the golden rays of a baroque monstrance drawing the eye to the white circle of God with us. And as those rays draw our eyes to the white circle of the sacred host, so the petals draw the insects into the ring of pollen bearing anthers round the edge, reminding me of Dante’s vision of the hosts of heaven:


In forma dunque di candida rosa
mi si mostrava la milizia santa
che nel suo sangue Cristo fece sposa;


ma l’altra, che volando vede e canta
la gloria di colui che la ‘nnamora
e la bontà che la fece cotanta,

sì come schiera d’ape che s’infiora
una fïata e una si ritorna
là dove suo laboro s’insapora,

nel gran fior discendeva che s’addorna
di tante foglie, e quindi risaliva
là dove ‘l süo amor sempre soggiorna.
In fashion then as of a snow-white rose
Displayed itself to me the saintly host,
Whom Christ in his own blood had made his bride,

But the other host, that flying sees and sings
The glory of Him who doth enamored it,
And the goodness that created it so noble,

Even as a swarm of bees, that sinks in flowers
One moment, and the next returns again
To where its labor is to sweetness turned,

Sank into the great flower, that is adorned
with leaves so many, and thence reascended
to where its love abideth evermore.


(Longfellow’s translation)



Like Dante’s great flower our sunflower is adorned with many leave, huge green flat things like serving spoons which collect the light and the rain to nourish the plant and the flower which is its summit and its reason for existing.

Although the flat central disc of that flower is reminiscent of a Sacred Host in a monstrance, in two ways I find it more like our vision of God than that perfect white circle: the ring of pollen bearing dots round the edge is an image of the saints and angels, gathered round God, and the central circle is dark and in shadow for much of the day, like the dark cloud of unknowing which prevents us seeing the glory of God even when hidden in a snow white wafer.

As I sat and drank in its beauty I was reminded of another image I was privileged to see once in my life – the Sun in total eclipse. The golden petals look like the corona, the flames of glowing gas shooting out from the Sun which we can only see during those few minutes when the glory of the Sun is obscured by the round black shadow of the Moon. As the sky darkened and the birds fell silent as the shadow moved over the face of the Sun there was a chill in the air, and when the last crescent of light disappeared and the corona emerged I felt a huge wave of bittersweet emotion wash over me and I wanted to cry.

It is little wonder that in the years before the Roman Empire embraced Christianity people were increasingly drawn to worship the Unconquered Sun, and that we still keep great the feast of that phase of monotheism – although today we call it Christmas, the birthday of that other Unconquered Son.

A friend long since deceased used to say that the main point of a garden was to sit in it. In our culture where being busy is seen as a virtue we tend to feel we have to apologise if we are not doing anything; we don’t see just sitting, even in a garden, as an important part of life.

But St Ignatius Loyola said that we were created ” to praise, reverence and serve God and thereby to save our souls“. The order in this is important; doing things – serving God – comes last. The British, so prone to the heresy of our compatriot Pelagius, are particularly likely to reverse that order, and to feel we are justified by being busy. St Ignatius being from the more indolent Mediterranean recognised the importance of music and laughter and good red wine to holiness.

A garden is the ideal place to praise and reverence God. Although Dorothy Frances Gurney’s view that “One is nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth” is theologically unsound and steeped in Victorian sentimentality, it is true that a garden is a place where many of us find it particularly easy to be aware of God.

Firstly there is the silence of the garden. This is not necessarily – indeed not usually – the absence of sound, because even if your garden is remote from human traffic noise and voices there will be birds tweeting, bees buzzing and the wind rustling the leaves. Rather in a garden there is space to hear the silent music of the universe which underlies those sounds. As we sit quietly just being in a garden that silence seeps into us, giving us that peace which passes all understanding. And strangely you can experience that silence even when you can hear the traffic outside the garden.

Then there is really looking at the plants in the garden. We often refer to an ornamental garden as a flower garden, and the variety of colours shapes and textures of flowers is extraordinary, but it takes time to notice this.

Many flowers change subtly as they come out, or even during the day. We have Californian poppies which are a completely different shade of yellow in the evening from early in the day. When we lived in London we had Evening Primroses (not planted but arrived courtesy of the wind or the birds). They made an audible pop when they came out. Also in London I had a young friend who was exceedingly hedonistic, but who showed great spirituality one day when he challenged me for removing the dead heads of flowers. “Why are you doing that? Things are beautiful when they are dying too”. Whilst dead heading some plants can encourage them to flower more, removing flowers or seed pods because they are untidy is to miss out on an important part of the garden experience.

But an ornamental garden isn’t just flowers. Leaves may be just basically food factories, but their variety of shapes, shades of green (and sometimes yellow, white or red) , and their vein patterns is an endless source of wonder. Indeed ferns (with which our garden is replete, my husband having a mania for them) do not flower at all, but the colour and structure of their leaves is magical. A lot of them have fractal patterns (as do many other leaves if you look carefully) One of my favourite plants is the sempervivum, which shows the mathematical basis of the universe in another way – their leaf whorls are arranged in a Fibonacci sequence.

We think of gardens as ours, but of course we share them – with birds, with our neighbour’s cats (not always a successful combination) and most of all with insects and spiders. Butterflies are of course the prima donnas of the garden with their glorious summer costumes, but bees enliven the garden too – the bumble bee is often one of the first signs of spring, and when more flowers come into bloom the honey bees buzz in and out of flowers, like Dante’s angels around the rose of the heavenly host.

When evenings become warm enough to sit out the swifts circle overhead, hoverflies maintain their dynamic equilibrium, and lots of tiny insects which I call gnats, though I have no idea of their actual species, fill the air and reflect the light of the setting sun. After dusk the bats come out and flap past in search of their evening meal whilst we digest ours.

Sitting is a good way to enjoy a garden, but so is moving about. Quiet early morning walks round the garden with a cup of coffee, or an evening wander with an aperitif are good ways to soak up the silence and see the beauty. Often on such ambles I notice something new – a plant I had forgotten about has come into bud or flower, or something has grown new leaves or branches.

Watching a garden change and grow over time is an important aspect of the pleasure of gardens, particularly in the Spring. An English translation of the Easter hymn “salve festa dies” by Venantius Fortunatus says:

Daily the loveliness grows, adorned with the glory of blossom,
Green is the woodland with leaves, bright are the meadows with flowers

You can if you wish A. E Housman go about to see this beauty, but your own garden (or a public one nearby) provides ample space to experience this annual miracle of resurrection.

The garden changes again the Autumn – colchicums appears from a bare patch of earth, then the Virginia creeper does its blazing colour change, the asparagus goes a brilliant yellow they leaves of the dogwood go bronze, falling at the next gale to reveal the blood red stems which will brighten the winter days to come.

Sunny days are the obvious time to enjoy the garden, but the smell and freshness after a day of rain when the drops of rain sparkle on the leaves is not to be missed either. Winter is not an ideal time for the garden, and there is much to be said for emulating the swallow and flying south for the winter, but even in the depths of winter the yellow jasmine cheers us up, and some brave souls – hardy fuchsias, the arbutalon, even the odd rose – defy the winter gloom with the odd flower. Whilst around them green spikes of daffodil, crocus and snowdrop appear out of the brown earth, heralding that radiant dawn of Spring.

Aristotle teaches that virtue is both a means to an end (eudaemonia, a worthwhile life), and an end in itself, because being virtuous is one element of eudaemonia. History does not relate whether Aristotle was a gardener, although it is hard to think he could have resisted the temptation to have an allotment whilst he was on Lesbos, if only to find out more about what promoted flourishing in vegetables as a change for studying the problem in human beings. If he were, he would have found that gardening is similarly both a means and an end. The end is of course the products of the garden; fruit and vegetables for the practical gardener, and the beauty of flowers and foliage for the more aesthetically orientated horticulturalist. These are themselves personal pleasures, but here I want to talk about the intrinsic pleasure of gardening itself.

Gardening is of course a form of exercise, and a most satisfactory way to enjoy fresh air in winter or early spring, when being outside is only tolerable if you are active. That can be a real pleasure, although a bit like hitting your head against a brick wall, because the best bit of it is the warm soup or hot chocolate you have in front of the fire or stove when you stop. But though this pleasure is intrinsic to gardening, it is not specific to gardening – a country walk or cycle ride can produce the same effect. The association is as the philosophers put it, contingent rather than necessary.

But gardening has its peculiar pleasures. Probably the greatest one is the opportunity it provides for co-creation – working with God in making the world a better place. Co-creation and its sister doctrine co-redemption are both logical implications of St Paul’s insight that “We are the Body of Christ”. If as St Teresa of Avilla said “Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours” then it is through us that the world of creation and redemption of the world goes on. I once heard a sermon on the role of Our Lady as co-redemptrix by a rather dotty and very extreme Anglo-Catholic priest, whom I often thought might have been the model of Fr Chantry-Pigg in Rose Macaulay’s Towers of Trebizond”. He drew out from the fact that Mary’s consent was required for the Incarnation, so that she contributed to our redemption, the idea that we all by grace have a small share in redeeming the world. Apart from that I cannot remember hearing anyone preach on the subject – which is a shame, as it might make people take their role in the world more seriously.

But getting back to gardening. Cutting back a buddleia, a dogwood or a clematis so it can bring forth new growth and flowers in due season; pruning a rose with just the right severity and the cuts at the appropriate angle; shaping a shrub, not into an artificially symmetrical shape, but to show off its natural habit to best advantage; like a good hairdresser rather than a cosmetic surgeon; all these are works of co-creation. As is reining in the natural exuberance of more thuggish plants so that they doesn’t intrude on their neighbours (a bit like teaching children good manners).

This pruning is the great pleasure of late winter and early summer but it goes on at a slower pace for the rest of the summer. One must seize the moment to cut back the flowers that bloom in the spring (tra-la) like chaenomeles and choisya when they have put on their show, and give the heather its haircut when at last its winter flowers start to fade; if not then these plants won’t do their duty and brighten the opening months of next year. And of course there are some shrubs so thuggish that they need trimming not once but two or three times in the year, lest they take over the world.

Another early year pleasure is tidying up – removing last year’s dead leaves, fallen twigs etc. Some people do this in the Autumn, but ecologists tell us this is a bad idea, because this dead material provides homes and food for insects over the winter. Doing it in the Autumn also smacks of the “gardening as housekeeping” school of thought – getting the garden neat and tidy for the winter in the same way as you oil the garden furniture and cover it up and put away the croquet set, In contrast doing it in the spring is about getting rid of the old stuff to reveal new life and let it grow and flourish – a very suitable activity for Lent.

A year round pleasure of gardening is weeding – spotting and removing things which ought not to be there. There is a sycamore tree about a hundred metres from our house, and its seeds with their clever little helicopter wings regularly make it to our garden. The price of not living in a sycamore forest is perpetual vigilance. Another particularly satisfying pleasure is rooting out bindweed – its white runners, snaking beneath the earth and popping up in unexpected places to strangle good and worthy plants seems to be the epitome of evil, and finding and removing it gives the same grim pleasure as inquisitors must have got from rooting out heresy.

Weed is of course a functional, not an ontological category. A weed is a plant in the wrong place. Some of the things which arrive through the will of God – borage from the garden of the Archeological Society four doors down the road, the teasels and the thistles which pop up from time to time – these are not weeds but welcome arrivals, a remember that God is a God of Surprises. Conversely some of the things we put there deliberately have a tendency to get above themselves and need to be culled regularly if balance is to be maintained. Crocosmia, bluebells and alpine poppies all fall into this category.

But the greatest of all the pleasures of weeding is that it makes you really look at the garden. Looking for weeds you really have to search the ground and notice the shape and colour of the leaves, just as deciding on how to prune forces you to look at the shrubs properly and notice the branches the leaves as well as the showy flowers. Gardening teaching you to look.

But perhaps this pleasure is really part of the next pleasure – Just Being in a Garden

This series of reflections is inspired by a work by the novelist Rose Macaulay, who published a book under this name in the 1930’s. As is the case with many good interwar novelists, much of her work is now almost forgotten, apart from her last and greatest novel “The Towers of Trebizond”. This is a shame, as she wrote well and her novels give perceptive insights into the human condition. During both her religious phases and her period as an “anglo-agnostic” she never ceased her exploration of how we should live.

Her “Personal Pleasures” muses on a wide variety of experiences in life, and I will try to do something similar. Some of her pleasures – churchgoing, solitude – I share, and will include in my list; others, like hot baths, clothes and bathing, leave me unmoved. Although most of her topics gave her genuine joy, some of them (talking about a new car, following the fashion) she was somewhat ambivalent about. I will start with pleasures I can endorse wholeheartedly, because my real interest in this project, as in The Diary of an Involuntary Anchorite, is the question which fascinated Aristotle – what makes a life worth living?

Aristotle derided a life devoted to the pursuit of pleasure as bovine, and our society is still influenced by a strand of post-Reformation Christianity (both Catholic and Protestant) which saw life as a vale of tears, and thought that if it wasn’t that already we ought to make it into one. There is a tendency therefore to be suspicious of pleasure of any sort and consciously or unconsciously to feel guilty for enjoying things.

It is true that there are pleasures which appear initially enticing but ultimately fail to satisfy – they are indeed worldy pomp and show. We have created a whole industry of advertising devoted to making us mistake these shadows for the truth, and perhaps we need to think about how we can shut our minds and turn our backs on these chimeras. But solid joys and lasting pleasures are part of the good life, and glorying in these is a lot more necessary to salvation than “thus thinking about the Trinity” can ever be. Hopefully by writing about those which strike me as worthwhile I will be able to find out how I can do this, and perhaps share this insight with others.