When I was young I studied Ovid's Metamorphoses, the major work of the poet Ovid. Learning Latin and studying classic Latin poetry is an experience that will stay with me forever. My book Goddess contains an excerpt from Book XIV of the Metamorphoses: the story of Pomona, the goddess of orchard fruits. Below is an excerpt of an English translation by A.S. Kline:

Pomona lived in this king’s reign. No other hamadryad, of the wood nymphs of Latium, tended the gardens more skilfully or was more devoted to the orchards’ care, hence her name. She loved the fields and the branches loaded with ripe apples, not the woods and rivers. She carried a curved pruning knife, not a javelin, with which she cut back the luxuriant growth, and lopped the branches spreading out here and there, now splitting the bark and inserting a graft, providing sap from a different stock for the nursling. She would not allow them to suffer from being parched, watering, in trickling streams, the twining tendrils of thirsty root. This was her love, and her passion, and she had no longing for desire. Still fearing boorish aggression, she enclosed herself in an orchard, and denied an entrance, and shunned men.

My characters in Goddess use this as a prayer to Pomona to help them germinate a dried fig - but what happens next is totally unexpected.