‘The days I don’t get into the garden I feel like something is amiss. It’s a mood changer’

My mother has never bought into therapy. Yet each weekend from March until September, when the temperature rises, she disappears into the fray of greenery that coats the back of our house. Gardening is, she says, nature’s therapy. “It’s compulsive,” she warns me. She’s right, too. In a year spent indoors, hackles permanently poised as crisis after crisis unfolds, the courtyard attached to our one bed bungalow has become a safe haven, of sorts. A...