One watched, she had said to the girl, and slowly, one learnt. One watched the bare soil to see the first leaf appear, uncurl and stretch and become itself, identifiably the leaf of that plant that one had planted and not some other; one watered, tended, transplanted; one watched to see it flourish. And when leaves discoloured one learnt then that there was too much water or too little, or that certain minerals were lacking in the soil, or that there was fungus or pest, just as Charlie had on the farm, Charlie who had walked the crops and plucked leaves and budding heads of grain and regarded them in the sunlight. One learnt the names of chemicals one could use, names that were as sonorous sometimes as the names of the plants, harsh modern chemicals at times, the kinds that they used on the farm, but then as she discovered the harm in them, going back to older remedies that the farmers would have scorned. And other small things one might do. How one might run one’s fingers up a tender red rose stem and crush the green bodies of aphids. Or scrape the scale insects from the hard undersides of bay leaves. Or go out at night with a torch and pick off caterpillars. One learnt that the mice had eaten the roots of the rhubarb through the winter. Or that it was the pigeons that had eaten the shoots of the beans – wishing then that Charlie had been there, to shoot the pigeons, the thought breaking through, that they might once again cut the breasts from the pigeons and fry them for supper on a bed of freshly picked salad. (And if they were to open the crops of the birds as they prepared them they would find shoots there, green as they had been torn from the plant, not yet digested.) One learnt that some plants were temperamental. Some that flourished in the summer could not take the cold of the Norfolk winter, the cold of the air or the wet of the soil, which was worse in some parts of the garden than others. One learnt where the frost pockets were, and where was most sheltered. One saw the plants that made it through and those that didn’t, the salvias that lasted only a couple of winters and found a third winter one winter too many. Some deaths were obvious. Some one could not fathom. A clematis, for example, could wilt all of a sudden over the course of a few gentle days of summer – or perhaps the problem was not wilt at all but only snails or caterpillars eating round the base of the stems.