The end of a year like no other. When gardening helped save many people’s sanity, including mine, and made some of the loneliness bearable. I won’t be too unhappy to see its back. I started sowing seed in trays at home in early March. I had a deep need to nurture. Helpless baby plants for helpless times. It was unclear in early lockdown whether plot visits would be allowed. Then came the OK. And the sun shone. And shone through spring and early summer. We dug, we hoed, we raked, we sowed. We built more hazel structures this year than ever before. Two ‘wigwams’ were dedicated to Basque tear peas. Two more were for Fern Verrow sweet peas and another extra-tall, extra-long bean tent. As usual, I overstocked. External disturbance was made mostly bearable by gardening’s inner peace. Then my wife’s mother became poorly, in Denmark. Suddenly even the safest places seemed unsettling, perhaps threatening. It was like being on the beach in Jaws just before the shark. We returned home in high summer to a plot looking unloved. I hadn’t been there to protect it from predators; black fly rampant, the helping hand withheld. Simple growing plans made more difficult. We restocked and repaired and it worked. A slate summer spent its shorter days, another forced five weeks away. Again, quarantined. Caged. I was saved by root-trainers on the roof and internet seed shopping. I sowed an extravagant assortment of Italian chicories, oriental leaves, a last lategasp of beans to replace the exhausted peas. Climbing nasturtiums swarmed the otherstructures. There were of course many perfect moments on the plot: the heavy-scented sweet peas, our saved calendula, flowering shiso, cascading rows of red tagetes. There was a fine bucketload of heirloom potatoes, peas eaten on the plot straight from the pod, owls calling close by, and dawn visits from the curious fox cub. And now 2020 is almost over. The garden clock turns. Another, perhaps kinder, year looms.