Summer last: I’m sitting under an apple tree in a small walled garden belonging to a friend’s mother, a poet, away in her native Berlin. On a wee rickety table is a modest feast: sourdough bread, cheese and sliced meats, salad mixed in a wooden bowl, glasses of white wine, and a jug of cucumber water. Miriam brings out macaroons, pastel jewels on a delicate plate. We nibble and chat in this garden dense with enchanting detail, indicative of care above all, the gestures of an intensely and purposefully led life. What’s attention but a claim on the world, on time? Later I will leave through a black gate, stepping onto a path beside a canal, blinking in bemusement as pedestrians and cyclists rush by.

That time in the poet’s garden lasted for an afternoon, but the afterimage still sparks after all these months. A garden isn’t just a garden, I think. While everyone’s garden is different, each garden is nevertheless a statement in an often brutal, violent world: another world is possible. For a moment, a century, the world was a tiny semi-wild country, overgrown and shaggy at the edges, full of zephyrs and shiny flying creatures, overseen by a whiskery dog panting under a leafy bower.

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