Ten years ago, as accompanying programme to my photo exhibition in Beijing in 2014, I gave a talk called “Cities, countrysides and why all heavens are gardens”. I love gardens. not so much the orderly geometric type, but those growing out of a wilderness. And I took the chance to stop over in my Secret Garden for three days. It was humid summer and all the greens are lush and grew quite a bit. Happy to see that after a lot of previous planting did not survive the drought of summer 2023. Also the old oak trees look fine, even though some took some damage by the excavator during construction and also there are some new diseases around, additionally to the stress climatic changes. Let’s see how the winter will be, and hoping there will be a cold one coming, I drained the pipes of the house, shut down the water supply and set the electric heating to 7° Celsius. It can get cold up on the plains of Hunsrück and I can feel on the Vespa how the temperature drops when I climb out of the Upper Middle Rhine Valley. There is 6 cm XPS insulation in the walls and double glazing. Let’s see how my electricity bill will look like in spring.