I was two when I came to love the tiny, red flowers that spilled over the worn doorstep of my first home and splattered the cracked pathway to the beck with vibrant colour. Like Hansel’s breadcrumbs, the scarlet pimpernel ribbon was my security on those earliest adventures, as I negotiated the bracken-laced slope to the water’s edge, steadying myself by clinging to the lichen-covered stone walls built by my father and generations of tenant farmers before him. Not yet high enough to see
