I spent Boxing Day in a hotel, a Christmas gift from my cousin, over 2000 metres atop Mt. Pilatus above Luzern in Switzerland.  After an afternoon in a museum of Picasso and Klee, we travelled up the mountain by cabled gondola for almost an hour over children tobogganing below.  We munched on toasted chestnuts, chucking the shells out a small transom window for the scavengers of the night.  We bobbed to the top to skies that could only end with the curvature of the earth.  Blackbirds that never leave the heights of this mountain scavenged on winter lichen frozen into the sleeping granite.  

It was as if you were free of your cramped window seat on a plane in stacked descent, and could sit on the wing.  That afternoon, the skies were as clear as the eyes of a newborn.  The lakes around Luzern were deep and blue; you could see how the city played itself into the contours of the land it had settled in.  Come nightfall, I had hoped for stars, but the lights of the top of the mountain were too strong.  But even then, there was the sense of cold, and darkness, and the wonder of how those who came before us lived in a world lit only by moonlight on snowfields.  When candles and glass in thin windows were the purview of the wealthy.  When, in the age of my grandmother, the lights of stringed pearls along the lakes below did not exist.  The landscape was covered in jewels, and I could stand in the frozen night, not being master of all I surveyed, but wonderfully grateful and humbled at the gift that had been given me.  A sumptuous dinner of excellent company and good wine fed the enchantment of this place.  Plans were laid to see it in summer.

At the deepest hour of that night, I ventured outside to a temperature of -6C.  I was wrapped well and looking for stars in the thin atmosphere.  Content to be solitary in the frozen night a few thousand metres closer to starlight far more ancient than the lights below.  There was peace and stillness and unforgiving cold.

Or so I thought.

 Within days I was on a train back to Brussels.   And a few days after that my garden was buried in snow and a cold doubly harsh to my mountain top.  The earth froze and the snow lay old and brittle on the ground, Miss Haversham’s wedding cake left to dust and grime and the cold of age.  Venturing outside was painful and for a few short winter days I thought I’d never be warm again and longed for the first sunburn of summer.

But this is the stuff of the seasons and seasons will change and the earth moves on.  This is the last chapter of The Potting Shed.   All that needed to be said has been said; it’s time to say something different, casting a new light through other windows.  In a few weeks this space will carry a new column, tentatively called “Blogging Brussels”, observations of life in Belgium generally, Brussels in particular.

I’ve been pleased and humbled that there have been those who have enjoyed these scribblings.  You validate me as a writer and I hope I have been of help as a gardener.  Kathleen has the corner on cooking, my other passion. I will sit on another corner, watch Brussels go by, and write about that.

I wish you all the greenest of thumbs and the joy of watching good things grow.  Back soon.