Adam’s teachers noticed it when, at nine, he stood up to introduce himself to the class, winked at Miss Hosemdown and said “I’m Adam and I was called Adam ‘cause Adam was the first man, and men always come first.”

She looked at him over the rim of her glasses and drawled “Tell me about it, kid, but you’ll learn not to be proud of that one day.”

She discussed Adam over coffee with Mr Marchman, who said “That kid’s got more front than a rat with a gold tooth, told me he wasn’t…

I’ve found I have more time for him lately, as the weight of years begins to gather in my own bones. I’ve learned to tell on which days he might like me to help him up the stairs and across the wide back room to their window.

He settles into his favourite chair as I open the casement and put on Mahler’s Ninth and together we sit looking out onto the garden. What used to seem not much more than the considerable but random beauty of chaotic planting I now see with his eyes – it is his…

When they first bought the house, the yard was bare, hard clay with patches of stringy grass. Over many weekends they dug and scraped, bringing in good topsoil begged from friends and transported in buckets.

They bought packets and packets of flower seeds, intending to plant them in beds of ordered colour, but then my Mother said “Let’s just go upstairs and throw them out of the window!”

And he heard his grandmother’s voice again and in that moment he knew what sort of man he…

It was his grandmother who gave him the idea, so many years ago, after he had contracted polio and spent nearly two years in bed.

 “It is up to you, Nathaniel; you can make the world whatever you want, as you would with a garden. You can plant in regimented rows, according to colour, genus and size, then weed and water, prune and protect, feed and foster. Your reward will be beauty and order, and these will satisfy a certain type of man.”

 Then she added, taking his small hand…

Look at him, standing in his unruly garden with his head wreathed in exhaled steam. It’s cold in the morning sun, the sort of cold that makes your joints ache but he’s still an early riser, as he has been all his life. No coy mottos about wisdom or worms – he just likes to get up early.

At least the dawn shows some promise, a warmer day on the way as Spring blossoms with the unhurried tilting of the Earth; At night, it can only get colder. At night, he withdraws to his small room at…