“In the summer, in Ali and Sarah’s garden, I asked Ali about the seasons. The garden helped her to make sense of them, she told me, because it had shown her the seasons in action. She’d seen winter ‘clear the rot of autumn off itself as it shook it off like a dog in the water and then you get that cleanliness, that cleansing of winter’. I’d thought of winter as many things: as dark, as quiet, as a deep and necessary sleep, but never cleansing. But in the stark light of a new year it makes sense. Indoors, I satisfy an urge to prepare - somehow, for something I can’t explain - by clearing out cupboards. I see the gradual decay of the garden as akin to this, as a process I cannot hasten or even properly witness. We are both making space for what Ali calls ‘the thud of spring’.”

- from my forthcoming book, Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival; available to pre-order now.

The frost came and took the nasturtiums on the morning of the evening I’d hoped to turn them into a salad. I’d not sown any, but they’d turned up anyway, smothering the lawn and the fence with equal devotion. Easy come, easy go.

I can list the tender plants that won’t make it out of the crystalline frost or the blanket of snow. The pelargoniums I never cut back and took in. The Plectranthus cuttings that rooted with so little effort. The dahlias hang like satin slips, blackened by the temperature. All the things I’ve failed to tend.

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As the snow thaws on the patio slabs I see the flattened stalks of the nasturtiums left in the wake of the freeze. Ali’s words, about the cleansing of winter, come back to me. The past few days have been stark and bright and crispy, or lost in a glaze of frozen fog. It has felt like winter - proper, storybook winter - this side of Christmas, for the first time in years. The flakes start to fall on Sunday night and I watch them through the window, the soft glow of the lights on the tree matched by the splintering sodium of the streetlamp outside. The next day, the light is soft and dull and bright all at the same time; you can see the difference even in how people are lit in their video calls.

Winter has cleansed the garden of the plants that I loved and the jobs I never did. It is strange, but it has felt more of a relief than a loss. I have stepped back from the garden this year and it’s been a process built on instinct, but not one without guilt. I cling to the notion, the desire, of newness: of changes made to the plot and of doing things differently. Perhaps this is just a phase I’m going through. I know it can’t last: I can’t just abandon the garden to rack and ruin. Inside me, there is a sleepy desire to plant a tree and sow sweet peas, to cut coral pink poppies and let them flop from a glass. It hasn’t woken up yet, but it will. The thud of Spring; when trees seem to explode with green all at once, and the dawn chorus is loud enough to wake us.

One of these dark days, when the snow has softened into the soil and the sun is meek, I will go out into the garden. I will clean and sharpen my secateurs. I will cut back the frost-bitten plants, and I will apologise to those that braved the cold. I will notice the winter bulbs that have returned despite my abandonment. I will dust out root trainers and fill them with compost, and I will push wrinkled little seeds into it. When I do that, it will feel good and I’ll wonder why I haven’t before. This has been a year of parties and words and big dreams and small beings and diary management and plans and accidents and deep skies and morning swims and Tuesday-afternoon-surprises. It’s also been one without gardening, and it’s coming to an end.