I am a terrible gardener. I love planting, coaxing packets of seeds into massed blooms but hate the relentless timetable of maintaining order. There were days when I’d work from dawn, pulling, trimming, sorting, pruning, until there were armfuls of weeds ready for the compost heap, my hands were stained and torn. Then I’d leave it for weeks, and gardens don’t wait, and so chaos would return.

Wren-nested ivy and honeysuckle sprawled over the flint walls, more clematis wound purple flashes through apple trees, ceanothus blooms poured fountains of blue. My greenhouse overflowed with clay pots of frilled lettuces, a wildly productive grapevine pushing jungles of leaves against the glass, striped shining tomatoes on the point of bursting. The pergola groaned and sagged under swagged tangles of wisteria, clematis, blousy roses. I loved that haphazard abundance, the unstoppable growth from deep, rich earth.

In sharp winter air, the garden stripped back to scaffold tangles of branches and seed pods, it was hard to remember that on warm nights we’d slept outside, listening to the snuffling rustles of hedgehogs gorging on the slugs in the hostas.

Diane St Clair’s Casablanca has that luscious weight of summer garden evenings. It’s not the pale pinks and acid greens of new spring, but the fecund sweet warmth of the best compost, of bees slow and fat and golden with pollen, of plants collapsing under the weight of their own blooms, and of dozing in the long grass of the orchard next to a sun-baked cat. There are riots of flowers here, but, with more skill than I ever achieved in my gardening.

This feels effortless and natural in a way that requires impeccable planning and control, so each time you move you gain a new perspective, a different balance of light and smoked shadow, and the whole thing envelops you in almost endless narcotic beauty.

Yes, I am swooning. Casablanca is gorgeous*.

* and monumental in the heat. In winter this is a taste of summer; in summer it is operatic.

p.s. If you’re in the UK: Sainte Cellier is able to import small quantities of Diane’s scents from time to time.

originally posted 15 May 2019, footnote added December 2025. Herschel the cat is much missed.