Country Diary: My secret garden, my lunchtime retreat | Anita Roy

Tonedale, Wellington, Somerset: I pick my way over builder's debris in the yard and sit by the river, water-crowfoot and demoiselles around meI'm in my secret place. Shhh. Don't tell anyone. You can't see it from the road. You can't see it from the old warehouse building where I work. It's tucked around the corner, behind a line of dilapidated outhouses on the site of a Victorian textile mill. I come down here most lunchtimes.It's a bit treacherous, picking your way across the yard, random debris from a builder's yard underfoot and the wreckage of last year's flood still lying around, now softened with beige thistledown. Plenty of snags to get caught on too - brambles loaded with plump blackberries, and clumps of the aptly named bristly oxtongue in among the Viking-horned spires of teasel. Continue reading...