To be a gardener, you need to tune in to how the plants are doing and attend to what they need. Many gardeners also testify to a feeling of receiving something in return — of being gifted, almost, whether through beauty or the food they harvest.

Some of the things I celebrate most are the incidental things — the annual flowers that crop up, that have sown themselves. When I garden, I have a sense of reciprocity: I do a bit, and then nature does her bit, and then I respond. There’s a feeling of to and fro.

This more symbiotic form of relationship — responding to and working with nature, rather than controlling or exploiting it — is what we need to shift to collectively. So it becomes less about simply taking what we want from the garden and more about a way of gardening that is beneficial for nature in the broader sense, through enhancing biodiversity and caring for the soil.