I I think I have seed amnesia, like a garden goldfish. I pick up packages in the winter and beg more of friends living in interesting places – Mexico, Eastern Europe, Oregon, India. It’s like I don’t know I have more.
I obsessively save money. You should never walk with me in early fall. I shake the flower seed heads in envelopes, paper bags, everything at hand. I shouldn’t be let go.
I see a plant that I admire and I track it down. I start by noting, say, a perfect single orange calendula or a delicate poppy for seed storage. Second, I feel guilty about Darwinist genetic selection.
Every year I transplant (most of) our seed collection to the housing estate shed, however, last year the mice decimated my carefully selected beans, munched on the tear peas and finished off the amaranth, leaving nothing but shredded bundles like mouse nesting material.
Still, there are more this season. I don’t dare tell you how many packages and bags of nasturtiums I hold, but it’s probably double digits. And, of course, they are already sown by themselves everywhere. It’s almost the same with many styles of calendula. It seems I can’t get enough.
“It’s a benign addiction, but an addiction nonetheless,” says my wife, a minimalist architect. And it’s not like I don’t know the plot is barely 20 square meters. But somehow in my head I’m collecting, buying, and sowing for the whole site.
There’s an old photo of Howard’s daughters Nancy and Rose when they were kids from our first season at Plot 29. I think there’s something about abundance that I’m trying to replicate – almost a jungle Henri Rousseau that a small child could cross in wonder.
This year should be different: there will be less height and more flowers. But like Alice, maybe I too can shrink and get lost in a forest of fennel.
Allan Jenkins’ Plot 29 (4th Estate, £ 9.99) is out now. Order it for € 8.49 from guardianbookshop.com