A small terraced garden, enclosed on all sides. It wasn’t always a garden as such, rather a tired patio, next to a sad border bed. It was merely level ground for a pair of old chairs and a table. We tended a few relic roses, then mint got into the bed and ran rampant through the degraded soil.

In the months before our daughter was born I made a conscious decision to do something about it - a child couldn’t thrive here, and neither could we.

The ground beneath a few raised corner flagstones was hard, stony and infertile. Backfill I wouldn’t eat a carrot from, even if it were possible to grow one there, which it wasn’t.

I decided to build and plant a raised bed, for growing vegetables, with peat free soil and organic seeds. I had little experience of growing and no real plan for what I was doing, other than to trust in nature.

“A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating” Wendell Berry

All that is true. As is the adage that in nurturing a garden what we really nurture is ourselves.

A little later I pulled up more flagstones and dug down enough to discover a buried second patio, and remove it. I barrowed in topsoil through the house and laid a small lawn. That same afternoon my wife was lying on the grass whilst my daughter rolled around in the sun.

Later still I added some native wildflower seeds, no more than a square meter. In the early spring the first bees emerge, invertebrates thrive. Though the songbirds stay away; save for an occasional joyous blackbird, the rest threatened by the magpies of the neighbouring alder. A vine cutting, a few years old, now forms an archway beside the tumbledown shed. In its shade the scent of jasmine suffuses the summer evening air. We let the lawn grow. And each year we marvel at new life.

This land isn’t ours in the long run, but for as long as we are here we will steward this small patch of earth.