I try to pick the sorrel with my hands and they come away empty, my fingernails tipped with dark red. It is just one of the things that have been growing quite happily in my absence - not just of the past 10 days, but the months before that. I have let the garden be for some time now, for most of the year, really. Not neglect, not really: I watch upon it with loving interest. All these things that unfold when my hands are in my pockets instead of the earth.

The garden belongs to the spiders now. Big fat motherly ones, spinning webs metres across that I daren’t cross. They mark out their territory over the long grass and the creeping tendrils of nasturtium - self-seeded, all of them. The buddleja that appeared in the front of the bed is tall and lumbering. Calendula, fennel and thistle rise up through the lawn. There are brown, crisping skeletons where the hollyhocks bloomed. I run a thumb across the globe of the Jerusalem sage and hear it scritch. Behind it, the salvia is fierce and blue.

To some, this will read like abandonment, but I see it as transformation. Two years ago this site was one of anxious despair and longed-for control. Now I head out there and it feels like a new landscape, one I’ve partly made, one I’ve learned to let go of. That letting go feels like an exhale.

I suppose the rot set in during the spring, when we took off on honeymoon for three weeks and I came back to find the sweet peas flowering. I have missed the boat to sow them this side of Christmas, and I wonder if I’ll come to regret it next year. With the summer came the drought. I took a step back from the garden. When the rains returned, it felt like what happened next was more the garden’s decision than mine.

There are reasons behind this happy apathy. For one, we’re hoping to landscape over the next few months, various tedious paperwork willing. I plan to lay gravel and dig new beds. It’s easier to leave things to rack and ruin when you know that intervention will happen soon. But also I am growing in other ways. Having spent the past couple of years with this garden, thinking about it in the twilight hours, writing about it extensively and sharing it in daily detail on social media, I’ve felt an almost unconscious need to retreat. This is a pause before a quickening. I’m undertaking a kind of dormancy. In the undergrowth, I find things a rose, perfect and newly opened. I take the kitchen scissors and bring it inside, long on the stem.

There are perennials to lift and divide. The window to cut back and overwinter the pelargoniums is shrinking. The cold frame has become the unofficial summer house of the neighbour’s cat. The bulbs sit in their cardboard box. At some point, I will reckon with the lawn. At a time when consumption feels overwhelming I think I’m questioning loss and gain on a deeper level. Things have died and others have persisted. I can’t control everything, and right now I don’t want to. There is a strange beauty in leaving it be.