I like flowers. My grandfather on my mother's side was a market gardener, so that may explain why. He grew the largest vine under glass in the world (planted by his father in 1891). He met his wife in London en route to serving in WW1. She was a French girl who had moved to London at the age of 16 to work as a tutor to children of the exiled Russian aristocracy. When they met she was working as a translator. He came back safely from the war and took her up to Scotland to live at the Vineries. Her name, Mathilde, was too difficult for the locals to pronounce so they called her Nancy. She spoke with a strange mixture of a Scottish and French accent, and whenever she became agitated she would lapse back into her mother tongue. She was the kindest person you could meet, and I've seldom come across anyone who laughed more easily than her. She would burst into a fit of the giggles at the drop of a hat. Every year my grandfather would grow two or three pots of French beans outside the kitchen window for her, to remind her of her home. She always welcomed the 'Onion Johnnies' - Frenchmen who came over to Britain and toured the countryside on bicycles selling strings of French onions - into the house for a cup of tea so she could chat away to them in French. As a young boy I remember sitting wide-eyed in an adjoining room eavesdropping on one of these - then totally incomprehensible - conversations. My grandfather was a quiet man whose passions were chess, curling, and cultivating new varieties of trailing geraniums.

Anyway, these sweet peas were given to me by a friend who lives nearby. I admired them in her garden and she brought me a few seed pods at the end of the summer. They are an old variety, popular in Edwardian times, small-petalled and deeply scented, but apparently too 'unfashionable' for modern tastes. I love their velvety texture and the stunning colour combination of each flower. I keep some seeds each year now and plant them against the wall that runs behind the small herb garden by the back door. Now isn't that interesting?