Life in the Garden

Like all proper spinsters, I have a cat. His name is Lord Peter Wimsey, and he is vain, neurotic, needy, and still manages to be completely adorable. He is quite fond of insinuating himself into spaces much too small for him, like the way he managed to finagle himself (and his mouse) onto the lowest shelf of this bookcase.
Peter shares my room with me, although he seems to think it's the other way around. I've recently moved back into the room I had in my early teen years, which is both odd and oddly comforting. Fortunately the decor is almost completely different.
As you can see, much of the space is taken up with books, books, and more books. I still have about four and a half boxes of books in storage, but I ran out of both shelves and wall space, so they'll have to remain there for now.
I wanted this room to feel as if it were part of the outdoors, an extension of the view from my lovely large windows which look out onto a sunken lawn surrounded by pines, river birches, and a California oak. The botanical prints on the walls and the various natural ephemerae that collects on my bookshelves helps, as does the windblown-leaf mural I created above the windows, but the best part of all is the lovely branch I stole when my father cut down one of our dying apple trees. It has an exceedingly odd shape, reaches all the way to the ceiling, and is the next best thing to living in a treehouse or conservatory (it's long been a dream of mine to live in one of the Victorian wrought-iron conservatories at Kew Gardens in London).