I’m really grateful to my friend Sean Dooley for sending me a poem written on seeded paper all the way from Shanghai and setting my teachers’ writing group the challenge of writing our own poems on plantable paper.

We’ll meet later this week to share our poems, with a view to planting them afterwards and seeing what comes up in the spring. Much as it feels a bit sacrilegious to plan to bury something in the earth that we’ve each created so recently, I also love the idea of literally growing something out of a poem. I hope to be able to post some pictures later on of what grows from our words.

The poem I’ve written, ‘Dark Peak, February’, was inspired by a visit to The Peak District during half term, during which I led a creative writing workshop for Her on a Hill. We were able to get outside despite Storm Dennis, although we were glad to retreat to the church hall in the afternoon to develop our writing further over tea and cake in the warm and dry.