She had been married to a farmer long enough to know that first she would have to learn the soil and what liked to grow in that soil. There were magazine articles with pictures of trees and flowers, and there was the Gertrude Jekyll, but most of Ralph’s books were dry. Sanders’ Encyclopaedia of Gardening. Catalogues on herbaceous plants and shrubs and climbers, manuals on pests and diseases and the pruning of fruit trees, all in tight text with the barest of illustration. A larger book with engravings, about Joséphine’s garden at Malmaison which Ralph had perhaps visited at some time before the war. She put herself to work as she had not worked at anything before. The snow had been beautiful at first, but it lay too long. The house closed around them. She planned and planned. Charlie fretted that he could not himself get onto the land, and now she understood his impatience. The melt happened so slowly. Snow turned to slush and then froze again. Even when the snow was gone the ground held on to the cold and then the wet.

The first thing she had Billy do was put in the yew hedge. She had intended just a defining line, a piece of form in this landscape which had so little form. She did not imagine that the yew hedge would grow as tall as it eventually did. Only the very great gardeners could imagine such things, she would think in years to come, the Capability Browns who could see into the future.

If the farm was his to make, then the garden was hers. She made the boundaries, as if to claim some space back from him, some ground that would be her own and separate from all the rest of the land in which the house stood so plain and exposed. She would wrap the garden in hedges, a hedge of yew to the front and side of the house, to the east and south, to claim herself back from his space; and when he was gone she let the hedges grow tall to limit the sky. She made it in spite of him and because of him. But with him too.

She planted the first of the roses the following winter, not long before Richard was born. They came bare-root from the nursery early in February. Richard was due in March.

Are you sure you should be doing that?

It was awkward, digging with that big belly sticking out in front of her.

Why don’t you wait till Billy comes? He can do that for you.

She thrust the spade into the ground again but the impact of it shot through her. She stopped, straightened, put one hand to her back, handed him the spade.