The garden started off as a lovely but neglected plot behind a grand Victorian house. The vigorous brambles shot forth new canes every year; as the older ones died off, they remained in place, a matted, thorny carpet concealing decades of rotten apples and rubble.

I dug them out and surveyed the bare earth and broken bricks, wondering what to do. When I'd built and edged beds under the trees for daffodils, constructed a spiral of broken bricks for herbs and alpine plants, and fed the vegetable patch with compost from the previous year's leaves and apples, I wondered, briefly, if perhaps I'd done too much. The garden didn't belong to me, after all.

However, it occurred to me that I hadn't brought anything in or taken anything out. The herb spiral was only a modest rearrangement of the pile of rubble it had once been. The soil was the same soil it had been before - tilled and weeded, of course, but forked through with compost from the nearby trees and hedges. The garden's capacity for transformation had been contained within it all along.

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