Flower and swirls on a hip

The frost got into the camellias along the south wall the week after you sailed, so I have spent a fortnight with a knife and a bucket of lime wash. The passion flower from the Madeira cuttings has held, though. It has run up the trellis as far as the gutter and thrown tendrils everywhere, curling back on themselves as if checking their own work. I sat under it yesterday with the ink pot and tried to draw one bloom the way it looked, five petals opened flat with the stamens standing up in the middle.

Mrs Ashdown came up the lane this morning wanting the same drawing for the lid of her late husband's writing box. She asked for the curls too, and I told her the curls were the hard part, because a tendril never does the same thing twice. I used the crow quill, pressed hard for the petals so they came out solid, then let the scrolls thin away to nothing at their ends. Where the pollen would dust the air I set small dots, nine of them, in a little arc.

She paid in shillings and asked whether the flower had a name. I said the men at Kew call it something Latin that I can never remember, but your mother always called it the clock flower, because it opens at the same hour every morning. She laughed and said it was the best name she had heard all week.

The drawing is pinned to the potting-shed wall now, weighted with a flat stone so the wind off the marsh cannot take it. A sparrow has already been at the dots. Come home by April, when the trellis is full, and I will show you where the frost could not reach. Bring the cutting labels too, the ones you wrote in your careful hand.

Your father, Walter