Patterns in the Garden

I enjoy patterns, man-made and natural, and as soon as I start looking around me, they are everywhere. The countryside in winter has tree skeletons silhouetted against the sky — trees without leaves. One day their background is dark grey, another it is clear blue, but there is always a natural pattern of trunk and branches, a lesson in symmetry with variations.

As the snow slowly melts, man-made patterns, still filled with snow, scar the fields where the wheel marks of tractors crossed the newly sown corn last autumn, sometimes straight, sometimes following the line of the walls or hedgerows.
— Rosemary Verey, gardener and garden writer, A Countrywoman's Year, January