Bonsai tree and iris on a thigh

The cedar came through Tuesday's gale with one limb torn clean and the rest bent further east, as though it had been leaning into an argument and lost its footing. I have wired the trunk and taken the broken branch above the second pad, exactly where you marked it in pencil on the potting bench. The wound is weeping sap, which Mrs Okafor at the nursery says is nothing to fret over, though she said that about the azalea too.

I found the iris on the south bank this morning, out of season and open anyway, its three falls spread flat as if it had been pressed in a book. I know you will call it a weed, but I cut it and put it in the jug on your kitchen windowsill, beside the brass scale you bought at the Chelsea sale. Where the water runs down the bank, the mud has dried into curls that look like the scrollwork on your father's gate.

I have decided not to repot the cedar. Your letter asked me to, in that careful hand, and I read it three times at the table. But the roots have found the stone at the bottom of the pot and wound themselves around it, and if I lift them now the tree will be a different tree. Mrs Okafor agrees, grudgingly. We will leave it one more winter in the same earth and see which of us gives way first.

The iris is still open as I write, purple against the grey of the pond. I have left it where it is.

Yours faithfully, Nell Ashby