It’s my birthday tomorrow. I won’t be working. Ever since I borrowed the idea from an older, smarter editor I admired. There were other attributes I learned: a yen for three-button navy suits, strong Italian drinks, American nonfiction writers from the 50s and 60s.
But back to why I most often spend my birthday in a garden. It is not as if mid-January is the most productive growing time. No fruit on the trees, few flowers to be found. But it is somehow inextricably tied into the gift of stolen time.
Perhaps looking back further than before. To my first garden in a London squat. Explosions of colour and height. An infectious inspiration spilling down the street.
To an organic commune in Anglesey, aged 19. With a baby and a wife in love with someone else. I left not long after her. The thin soil and people unwelcoming.
Other London gardens came and went. Mostly small and tall, always flowers. Some communal growing.
But it was allotment life that changed everything. Fulfilled the Anglesey promise. The joy of picking peas from the pod, like scrumping Devon apples as a child. Digging new potatoes. Growing climbing beans: French, blue Blauhilde. A crisp lettuce in the summer. Spicy Japanese mustard leaf in midwinter. A bunch of homegrown orange blooms in the half light on a summer table as I write.
Now there is also a Danish meadow by an eastern northern sea. More wild flowers than ever before. Where Henri, too, can relive her childhood. Long summers running free.
Tomorrow, though, we will be far away. We’ll go to a southern Indian flower market. We will buy marigold garlands for Christopher and cast them out to sea. In memory of a less lucky brother who didn’t get to live as long as me.
Allan Jenkins’s Plot 29 (4th Estate, £9.99) is out now. Order it for £8.49 from guardianbookshop.com
