This June, I find myself thinking a lot about gardens—and weddings. With six ceremonies ahead this year, and 35 years of marriage behind me, it feels as though both are part of the same quiet work: tending, noticing, returning, and letting things grow in their own time. The passage from the Gospel of John that often carries the heading “Love in Action” has stayed with me. It reminds me that love is never static. It moves, it responds, it is pruned and replanted through the ordinary days of life. In the same way, gardening is never just planting once and walking away—it is attention, patience, and the willingness to keep showing up. Marriage, too, feels like that kind of work. Not dramatic or distant, but rooted in small daily acts of care that slowly shape a shared life. And in every wedding I witness, there is that same quiet promise: that love will be lived out, not just spoken. There is something comforting in the thought that we are not asked to perfect love, only to practise it. As John reminds us, “Love one another” is not an abstract idea but a lived reality—worked out in ordinary time, in ordinary hands. And perhaps that is the gentle joy of it all: love, like a garden, is never finished. It is simply tended. “Love is not static; it grows where it is tended.” Happy June Reverend Emma x