Also, I want to complete a series or combined volume about herbs and their planetary rulers and how this relates to specific properties, magickal correspondences, associations and usage. As well as these works, I would like to write about creating a magickal garden. This would cover such things as working in harmony with natural and elemental forces, with the Devas and Fae, as opposed to the modern way of attempting to dominate and control nature.

My own garden has produced several very unusual botanical phenomena and rarities. Back in the mid '70s I used to write a column for a UFO magazine called 'Magic Saucer' and one of the other regular contributors was a lady called Lynne Halsall. Lynne claimed to be channeling an ET known as Quella, and often he spoke of communication by telepathy. I suggested in my column that readers might like to join me in an experiment in sending a thought form to Quella, and for convenience I selected a 4-leaf clover as a plant symbol everyone would be familiar with. We never received any confirmation from our ET friend by way of a message but in a short while something very odd started to happen in my garden: a patch of white clover started to bear clusters of tiny leaflets on stalks in place of white florets. I reported all this in the magazine. Many years later a hop vine in my front garden, which was growing normally along the fence, began to produce very strange fruit as it climbed up my drain-pipe. These hops were over twice the size of normal ones and also had leaflets coming out of their sides as well as additional tiny hops borne on stems growing out of the main body. I sent some specimens in to the South Wales Echo gardener's questions page but I got a reply from the botany department of the National Museum of Wales. Gwyn Ellis Head of Vascular Plants Department of the museum sent me some photocopied material and explained that my hops were “teratological.” The term means “monstrous” and signifies a mutation or deformity. He requested some more specimens for their collection and asked if it would be OK to list my house as a site where such botanical oddities have been found. This was my introduction to the term “teratology.” Then a year later some soapwort (saponaria officinalis), which I was growing from seeds taken from plants growing in a local lane, also grew in an abnormal way. The flowers, unlike their parents, produced a surplus of petals for each blossom, and due to the excessive number of additional petals were often unable to open normally. I took some of these to show Gwyn Ellis and again he confirmed a case of teratology! The only suggestion as to why plants were growing like this in my garden and not my neighbours was that this mutation is sometimes known to occur where herbicides are used. This made little sense because my garden is a place where such poisons are never used. So the matter remains a mystery unless we believe that Quella had something to do with it all.

Another bit of magick that occurred in my garden was when last summer a crop of 7 kiwi fruit was produced on a vine which had never yielded fruit before even though it always had plenty of flowers. I had been complaining to my friend Ayla the Witch (http://ayla.brinkster.net) that I never got any kiwi fruit on my vine and she responded by saying she thought that this time I would. Well, what do you know? Within a few weeks of her being in my garden fruit started to develop for the first time on my vine, and they were growing on the plant near where she had been sitting. The story got reported in my local paper and was attributed to my friend's powers.

This is not the only exotic fruit story I have because the Xmas before I had been featured on HTV Wales national news as the “First Welsh Pineapple Grower.” I managed to successfully grow a pineapple in my living room and it was ripening at this festive time of the year.