back to the mess and the scruffy hedge, and then forward to the neatly ploughed field which I knew would be mine as soon as the deeds were signed – a vast expanse, it seemed, twenty times the size of any garden I had owned.

The landscape around me was, however, alarmingly flat, a field of barley, a field of sugar beet, over the road a field of wheat – a few small trees almost on the horizon. Where was the rise and fall of my Hampshire hills? The garden itself fell slightly, very slightly; but what we longed for was height – trees, large growths, and above all ups and downs in the landscape. Our early wishes to get any shrub, tree or plant which would grow more than three feet were due to consciousness that everything was as flat as a billiard table.

It was a lovely experience, all the same, especially when I thought of all the plants I might ultimately grow in that splendid space. I stood out there, hair blowing, trying to see how rich it would be – full of dreams and realities. This would be my garden. I ordered a number of half-standard apple trees, a pear, a crabapple and a cherry – and they were the cheapest I could buy – so cheap that three-quarters of them were wrongly named – but the Bramley was right and true, and thirty years later it all looks lush and beautiful. And the little curly path remains and will do so – perhaps because it’s so exactly right – fluky but perfect.

In these early days I was mainly engaged with Diana and various friends, in building, windowing and flooring the mill itself and hadn’t much time for the garden. All the same, I had time to make a cold frame out of turf with a discarded but glazed window on top and to raise the first of many many batches of sweet peas in it. This was a rich pleasure after the not entirely satisfactory and half-hearted kinds of gardening possible in London. This was rural, pastoral, country gardening with a vengeance, and I looked forward with a life-long ambition to making it grow and live. A visit to Diana’s relations at Coventry brought us a batch of lilacs, berberis, laurels and other bits and pieces which still make one of our major boundaries, between the flower garden and the vegetable garden. Many times we have trimmed back this ever-thickening hedge: many times it has brought us broods of thrushes, blackbirds, dunnocks, greenfinches: many times we have cut delicate branches of Spirea van Houttei and fat Senna pods for the winter. It was our first tall feature, and started tall, unlike the £5 worth of hawthorn hedge which we asked for as a Christmas present and which Diana’s mother gave us – a small neat bunch, a double handful perhaps, of 2' stems – and which now is a substantial chunky hedge – according to Bill Read the best hedge in the parish.