I’m just in from our back garden, fingers stained red from a hefty picking of raspberries. That’s right! It’s time for me to subject you to more garden porn, complete with pictures and sticky fingerprints on the keyboard. Most of you know that I grow my own veg and that I’m quite often inspired by getting down and dirty in the veg patch. I’ve written stories, chapters, entire novellas about the naughty things that can happen in a vegetable garden, or in a flower garden, or any garden for that matter.

Everyone loves to walk through a well-tended garden, and knowing you lot, as I do, I figure it’s probably a safe bet that, like me, you’re looking for all the nice little hidey-holes and private places where on might have a grope or cop a feel. Oh, you might not necessarily use them, but you’ll think about what it would be like if you did. You might be admiring the size of the courgettes or the cucumbers, or possibly even thinking about the dual use of the ordinary garden variety (You see what I did there?) carrot with it’s lovely orange shaft penetrating the earth while the lush fronds above ground are so very green and flogger-like. Who doesn’t love to play with their food?

My veg patch is sometimes well tended, but more often than not it looks a little rough around the edges, and as much as I love to wander through a well-ordered patch, it’s even more fun to shove and push my way through an overgrown garden. While there may not be an orgy of phallic veggies waiting to be picked, there are lots more places to hide and grope and play.

Personally, I think there’s something about a garden overgrown, a building left derelict that invites trespass. A five-star hotel is one thing, and believe me, I’m not dissing the pleasure of a fine mattress, but there’s something primal about a fuck on a mossy stone bench behind an overgrown hawthorn hedge, or forget the bench, the grass will do just fine, and it’s softer. Uncomfortable? Hell yes! But there are a lot of things that are worth doing in spite of the discomfort.

Maybe it’s about connection. Maybe that’s the appeal of a garden to me, you know, feeding ourselves with what we’ve grown, and garden porn … well if we eat from the earth, why not rut a little closer to the earth? It works for all of our animal cousins.

Maybe it’s just the time of the year. Maybe there’s something about watching the birds in the garden go at it, or seeing the plants grow from seedlings to fruiting courgettes or beans or corn plants. Perhaps it’s that first ripe strawberry teased out, fondled and plucked from the bed and then popped into your mouth, all juicy and sweet … or maybe popped into the mouth of a lover. Certainly soft, ripe fruit dripping and succulent is responsible for a multitude of sensual metaphors. My mouth is watering just thinking about it, and even more so at the thought of sharing that ripe juicy fullness mid-grope on that mossy stone bench behind the hawthorn hedge.

Several years ago while walking a bit of the North Downs Way not terribly far from home, my husband and I came across a hedgerow overgrown with wild plums. There must have been a quarter of a mile of scraggly trees, heavy with swollen fruit, buzzing with hungry insects. We ate all we could, licking the sticky sweet from our fingers, laughing like children, feeding each other and teasing. Then we stuffed our bags and took some home with us. All

throughout that next week, we ate fat, squishy plums and reminisced about our walk. The sensuality of the experience, the unexpected lushness of being offered up a feast in the middle of nowhere, the feeling of discovering a treasure trove has stuck with me. I have that feeling whether we’re picking wild blackberries along the canals and walking paths or harvesting sweet corn from our own little patch, that sense of awe at the abundance, the largesse of nature, that feeling of participating in something far more primal that just eating what’s good for me. The sensuality of what grows, the fecundity of the season can’t help but inspire the libido, and the muse takes full advantage of it, pointing out the subtle and the not so subtle inspiration of planting and digging and picking and eating and … playing with what we eat … playing with someone else with what we eat. With all that in mind, it’s hardly a surprise that gardens figure so prominently in story and that so much of what’s written about gardens is sexy.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go wash up the raspberries and share them with hubby. Happy summer, everyone! Share a peach, pop a cherry, appreciate the shape of a courgette, admire a carrot for the parts you don’t eat. Even though sometimes it’s easy to forget, at the end of the day, we’re still a part of nature, and sometimes that’s just fucking sexy! Enjoy!