People often ask me if I miss our old house and I always say it’s mostly the garden, which we planted when Ira was nine months old in between his naps, and which in my head seemed to grow at the same rate he did.

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When we moved here there was no garden, just some empty beds and a thicket of noxious privet trees behind the falling-down fence up the back, although there was a particularly beautiful and very old plum tree.

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We suspected we owned the privets but we weren’t sure, so we got a survey done to confirm it: the day the survey came in, I poisoned them. Allegedly, it takes them six weeks to die. Two weeks later there was a big storm and I watched as the leaves, still green, came off the trees in great drifts, swirling to the ground like the plastic bag at the start of American Beauty.

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And then: nothing. For two years, we looked at dead privets because we couldn’t work out what was happening – to either the garden or the house – and I kind of wished we’d left them because at least we couldn’t see the neighbours before.

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Finally, in January, we bit the bullet. I got on the chainsaw (unlikely, I know) and took down the trees, which I have now spent a happy winter burning since they’re perfectly seasoned after being dead for two years. Our builders Dwayne and Troy came around and built a very nice new retaining wall and a very nice new fence on our very nice new boundary. We painted the fence, and then we brought in trailer loads of compost and mulch, and I sprained my ankle and spent Easter in bed, but that’s another story.

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Then finally – and I do mean, finally – last weekend, we got planting. There are new trees for birds on the neighbour’s side to screen us both, and there are miniature toi toi and coprosmas and a creeping Ticomanthes and about 100 other varieties: we are not minimalist gardeners.

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The scope has crept: somewhere along the line I managed to convince Hannah we should take out the lawn in the front, too, and turn that into garden (sponge cities!). Then we got a bit overwhelmed and had to ring Zoë the garden designer to rescue us, and she came around and did some really beautiful sketches and suggested plants that we never would have thought of, and things got back on track.

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The plants are in the ground and they’re growing, and now it’s started to rain – a soft, springy rain, even though it’s only mid-August. Winter is nearly done, the Official Cash Rate just went down for the first time since 2020 and it feels like things are turning the corner. I can see the oi ois moving in the breeze.

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New beginnings indeed.

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