Hope and expectation

Asparagus was always something my mother cooked for me on my birthday: having green fingers, her bed at Arrow was invariably productive. When I was feeling rich one Christmas, I bought my parents a set of special plates to eat their asparagus off. They came from Gien on the Loire: we have inherited them.

Though keen on growing vegetables from when I moved to live in the country in 1973, it wasn't until 1982 that I prepared and planted up an asparagus bed. The following year, we moved house - and with snow on the ground we neglected to tell the buyers not to dig up the crowns. Walking past our old house a while later, I saw that they had dug over the bed.

Perhaps as an unconscious prod to stir myself towards another move of house, I planted a few more asparagus crowns in our Cheltenham garden yesterday.