Years ago I collected my new prescription glasses and walked home staring up like a person who had time-travelled from a pre-aeroplane era: I had no idea trees had individual leaves that could be seen from the ground. Before 2020, I had never noticed gardens, either: they were things that old people liked and neighbourhood dads mowed constantly. The garden attached to my flat became interesting only if a fox was standing in it. Then lockdown happened, and the people who usually kept the vines and trees from eating the building stopped coming. I tried to sort it out myself, pathetically Googling to figure out what was supposed to be there and what was an alien plant invasion. Somehow, I ended up watching Gardeners’ World.
I can’t remember the first episode I saw, nor the first time I heard Monty Don talk about elephant garlic. I’d never heard of a “sweet pea” outside of Popeye cartoons, but I remember Monty telling us that their fragrance was intoxicating. I learned that flowers that looked like living spirographs were called dahlias and that tulips and daffodils, the…
