After those months of frost, rain and cold it is suddenly time again to rid the borders of unwanted invaders. Unfair actually, because these little plants have been living here for a hundred thousand years and now they have to make way for exotics from Turkey, Portugal, South America and I don’t know where from. The ‘westward migration’ of 1843 in the US, but at garden level with the same deadly effect on the natives, murder and mayhem, but they cannot be eradicated. Seeds for the next year have already been scattered.

One species I save and replant carefully with her peers and between the pavement I just let them grow: Oenotera, the evening primrose. Because of my neighbour and her Onagres, which travel on the wind from her garden to mine.

An old lady, still living in her parents’ house, in a tree-lined yard without the wide view I have. She sold my land to the builder of this house 30 years ago because she needed money and he promised her, not to clear away the ruin of the cabanne. The edge stones were still there when I bought it and I too had to promise her, that I would not remove it. Her eyes shone when I told her it was going to be a walled cottage garden.

Later, on a summer evening on our terrace, with a chilled white Pourçain, she looked at the little wall and with tears running down her cheeks as she told me “Only my mother knew that Jean and I in that cabanne had given ourselves to each other on that summer evening of August 31, 1939. Not only we lost our innocence that night, the whole world did. The war had begun.