Day 1 - I randomly choose September in the garden.

What camera can capture the glorious glint of the dragonfly as it skips through the steaming air over the pond on thinner-than-tissue wings? Only the frozen still-frame, perhaps, the fractionless moment that the naked eye cannot distil, motion chopped into sections of science. Even the video camera as it tries to follow the mesmerising flight pattern, deliberately pointed as it is, fails to register the surprise and joy of the insect's sudden arrival or the scarce-contemplated longing in its absence.

A garden, then, filled with yearning, an enfolding place that comes at you from behind, unexpectedly, when your limitations are directing your eyes to the front.

And that sweet soporific perfume that bathes you now in the languidly falling September sun, can it really be that ragged and unassuming bush, Abelia chinensis, which you were about to pass by with barely a glance?

Or when your conversation pauses, and the peaceful silence descends, are you startled to find it suddenly filled with the gentle crackling of a thrush devouring snails and the withering leaves tapping lightly on the turf with every late-summer gust, amid the perpetual drone of hoverflies feeding and the flies that taste the pearls of perspiration on your brow?

You may bend to prise the velvet leaf from a Salvia argentea and stroke it against your cheek, or chew a plump blackberry from a rogue bramble which someone failed to weed from a hedge.

You may do all these things and in the process stimulate all five senses. You may experience a profound sense of peace and satisfaction. It could be that you will feel you have communed with nature, that you are at one with the world.

But no, for this is a garden - a place where you will meander past beds where a plant from Chile seems to grow harmoniously touching its neighbour which is endemic to an obscure mountain location in China. In the springtime, the same soil shared by their roots is littered with flowering bulbs from otherwise barren Turkish hillsides, and the whole display is overshadowed by and enormous North American oak, whose scarlet plumage in the fall is fluttering piece by piece now to land around your feet. And what's that there? - a man-made hybrid, sterile, grafted, existing only as long as you value it enough to perpetuate it.

No, this is not nature, it is a garden, an ideal representation of how someone would like nature to be. It is false, it is artificial, it is against nature. It is a work of art.

(Don't forget, when you have read this, that this is just the first part in the story of a professional gardener. If you want to delve deeper, and enjoy anecdotes, tips, humour and a straightforward nose into someone else's life story, then you need to go to the top of the page, and click on the links for Day2, Day 3, Day 4 etc, preferably in the right order. Even if Day 1 didn't particularly appeal, the rest of it might, as each post is different).