The Allotment

Joan had taught geography at a Bristol secondary school for thirty-eight years, and in all that time she had never grown anything more ambitious than a pot of basil, which had died. So when she retired, and her name finally reached the top of the waiting list for an allotment, nobody was more surprised than Joan herself. She had put her name down eight years earlier, after a glass of wine at a friend's barbecue, and had completely forgotten about it.

Plot 14 was a long, narrow strip of earth on a hill above the city, between a railway line and a row of other plots. When she first saw it, in March, it was covered in brambles, nettles and a broken wheelbarrow. She stood at the gate in her brand-new boots and seriously considered giving up before she had even started.

Her neighbor on one side was a man called Reg, who had rented Plot 13 for forty-one years and grew prize-winning leeks. He watched her struggling with the brambles for a whole morning without saying a word. At lunchtime he walked over, looked at her blisters and said, "You're wasting your time doing it like that. You'll never get rid of them by pulling. You need to dig the roots out." Then he went back to his leeks. Joan was not used to being told what to do, and she spent the afternoon complaining about him to anyone who would listen.

The people on the other side were more welcoming. Plot 15 belonged to the Haddads, a family from Aleppo who had arrived in Bristol five years before. Samira and her husband, Yusuf, had both grown up on farms, and they grew things Joan had never seen in an English garden: tall broad beans, fat purple aubergines, chilies and a kind of mint that smelled like lemons. Their daughter, Lina, was ten and in charge of the strawberries. She took one look at Joan's plot and offered to help her for the price of one biscuit a week.

The last member of Joan's unofficial team arrived in May. Camila was a student from Bogota, doing a master's degree in environmental science at the university, and she rented half of Plot 16 because she missed having her hands in the soil. She was full of ideas about composting, insects and companion planting, and she talked about them so enthusiastically that Joan, who had always hated being lectured, found herself listening.

Little by little, the plot changed. Yusuf taught her how to build frames for the beans. Samira insisted on giving her seedlings, and refused to accept money for them. Camila persuaded her to stop using slug pellets and to put up a small pond for frogs instead. Lina taught her the names of everything in Arabic and laughed at her pronunciation. Even Reg, who still disapproved of almost everything she did, left a bag of his best seed potatoes by her gate one morning, without a note.

Joan complained constantly. She complained about the weather, the snails, her back and the fact that nothing seemed to grow as fast as it did in the books. But she also found that she was looking forward to going up the hill every day. She, who had always been afraid of making mistakes in front of other people, now made them in public every week, and nobody seemed to mind.

In August, the allotment society held its annual show. Reg won first prize for his leeks, as usual. Samira won the prize for best vegetables from outside the UK, and Lina won a special mention for her strawberries. Joan entered three slightly odd-looking courgettes, mostly as a joke. They came last. She did not care at all.

That evening, the neighbors of Plots 13 to 16 had dinner together on the grass, with Samira's stuffed vegetables, Camila's arepas and a bottle of Reg's homemade plum wine. When the sun went down behind the railway, Reg raised his glass. "To Plot 14," he said. "It took her five months to stop doing everything wrong." Joan looked at the others, then at her hopeless courgettes, and raised her glass back. "To my teachers," she said.