PLUMS ON PARADE

Gardening can mean many things to different people, from the aesthetic of creating a beautiful herbaceous border to the sheer visceral pleasure of burrowing in the soil to unearth your first new potatoes of the season. For me, gardening has meant embracing two attitudes which don’t come easily: patience and compromise.

Patience as a gardener is relatively straightforward to grasp. Garden centres may be full of pots of instant colour (and these hits of immediate gratification certainly have their place), but the real joy comes from planting a seed with the promise of fruit or flower in several months’ time. Or, in the case of planting a mulberry tree, in about 10 years’ time.

Compromise becomes clear once you have