Alistair Cooke was one of the world's best-loved broadcasters, whose weekly BBC radio programme Letter from America entertained listeners around the globe from 1946 until his death in 2004. Penguin publish editions of Cooke's Letters spanning the length of his career. Those collected here - some previously unpublished - have been specially selected on the theme of the changing seasons to show the range, intimacy and elegance of Cooke's inimitable style.
I look out of my study window now and suddenly - after a wild succession of wind and sun and bitter cold and then 70-degree days, I look out, and suddenly the fuzz of Central Park's woods has turned to sprightly green blossom. And around a bend of the reservoir the forsythia is out and white dogwood and that tree about which an English poet, by a simple switch of words produced a memorable line: "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now."
So, I'm sure, I hope, lots of people feel as I do: that whatever horrors are recorded on the evening news - in Bosnia, in Zaire, in Jerusalem, wherever - our guilt is a little softened by the arrival of the marvellous spring. A terrific Anglophile I know once said, at this time of year, "Oh, to be in England, now that Spring is there." My wife said, "Oh to be anywhere now that Spring is there." Correct.
And this weekend in particular, I think of one place more than another that I might be, where I have been going for just over thirty years, but no more. Down to Augusta, Georgia - the only place on Earth I believe where the best in the world play golf in a sumptuous botanical garden: three hundred and sixty-five rolling acres with their towering Georgia pines, and the azalea bushes, and the white dogwood, and the pink dogwood, and the magnolias and Firethorn and Redbud and Yellow Jasmine - all the native flowers of Georgia and beyond. Not planted in plots - nothing remotely as disciplined and sergeant-majored as a French garden. Rather bushes and spreads along the creeks and meadows, here and there and everywhere. Not by accident. But by a thunderbolt of God's grace or nature's - however you prefer to say it. This is how this vast garden came about.
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