borders containing the treasures we really prize. In the far corner of the plot, beyond the orchard on the bank of the ditch we made our bonfire site, which is always a mess but also a pleasure as it represents change – wood, leaves, stems with flaring fire and finally hot white fragile wood-ash, which we sometimes use for feeding the little drills of vegetable seeds.

As I have said, we had arranged after protracted negotiations that we could buy a quarter of an acre from the field and the chaotic chicken-run weed patch belonging to the mill made the other quarter, so that we should have half an acre in all – plenty, we thought, and plenty as it has turned out, not only for vistas, beauty and general spacious lavishness but also to grow most of the vegetables and much of the fruit that four could need – and certainly an ample amount to fill the maw not only of two parents whose babies have flown the nest and set up their own establishments, but also a large humming and extraordinarily capacious deep-freeze, which is nearly always stuffed with produce – five-sixths of it home-grown. So though I won’t pretend that we planned and landscaped the garden a lot – a great deal of it merely “happened”, like Topsy – we did early on think of the patch dividing into four approximately equal patches: starting on the left and going counter-clockwise, an orchard, grassed; a vegetable patch (a quarter seemed reasonable and though we loved the thought of home-grown vegetables we weren’t going to be martyred to this concept); a lawn and pleasure garden dominated more and more by the astonishing gift of the mulberry tree; and a fourth section, backed by the ditch and sided by the disgraceful beautiful gappy bird-haunted hedge, was to be soft fruit and so on. The really surprising feature about this plan is the negligible space it gives to flowers – shrubs, climbers, perennials, “bedders” and all the other extraordinary beauties which I now think are the garden’s main feature. Pleased with my rows of broad beans, proud of my greenhouse tomatoes and pots of basil, I am really concerned with showing friends and visitors the flower garden – roses when they are out, everything else when they’re not.

Dashing back thirty years – which seems incredible as it also feels like the day before yesterday – I must remember as exactly as I can the morning and evening walk over the ragworts, codlins-and-cream, thistles, nettles, bumps, lumps, rabbit-holes – the ditch edges in fact which backed – or fronted? our garden as it was to be – or at least defined its southern limit – and I walked from the familiar scruff to the deeply ploughed areas until I reached my five-foot bamboo which marked the corner of the garden. All of this was to be ours by or before Christmas. I had measured meticulously “164” and stuck the bamboo into the ground so that I could sight the exact extent of all my small empire-to-be. I would look