What do you want me to say? he used to shout. My work was straightforward: I collected plants and designed parks and gardens. No more and no less. I live in a house I built with my own hands, surrounded by my acres of plants and trees, some common and some very rare, so rare you would have to walk into the heart of the forest for days, as I did, to find them. Some of the trees I planted long ago, when I was young, he would shout, and now they are old, like me, and yet, unlike me, their plans haven’t been ruined, sullied and ruined, suffocated in darkness. Once—only once—did I look him squarely in the eye and say, quietly and clearly: It isn’t you who got suffocated in darkness. I’ll never forget the look on his face, like a child who had never before been slapped across the mouth. He recoiled, or tried to recoil, but in the end one can’t recoil from oneself.