A garden trip which amazed me.

This garden was a magic land, a forest of flowers through which roamed creatures i had never seen before. Among the thick, silky petals of each rose-bloom lived tiny, crab-like spiders that scuttled sideways when disturbed. Their small, translucent bodies were coloured to match the flowers they inhabited: ballerina pink, ivory, wine-red or buttery yellow. On the rose stems, encrusted with green flies, ladybirds moved like newly painted toys. Rotund and amiable they prowled and fed among the anaemic flocks of greenfly. Carpenter bees, like furry, electric blue bears, zig-zagged among the flowers, growling fatly and busily. Among the white cobbles large black ants staggered and gesticulated in groups round strange trophies: a dead caterpillar, a piece of rose petal, or a dries grass head fat with seeds.

At first I was bewildered by this profusion of life on our very doorstep that i could only move about the garden in a daze. Then i discovered that crab spiders could change colour as successfully as any chameleon, from the coral of a wine-red rose to the pearl of a white one within two days.

All these discoveries filled me with tremendous delight. As i roamed further afield i also found new beasts to occupy me. In the crumbling walls lived dozens of little black scorpions, shining and polished. In the fig and lemon trees just below the garden were quantities of emerald-green tree frogs; up on the hillside lived snakes of various sorts, brilliant tortoises. In the fruit orchards were myriads of species of birds of all colours.