IN a jar to the side of my desk sit a number of upturned items: a 6H pencil from the table at which my father wrote that I use for sketching garden plans, a pen for writing plant labels and a fork that’s more practical than pretty.
This is the fork—with its coarse tines—to which I turn for a month or two each summer to strip the blackcurrants from each plant when its fruit have swelled and pulled the limbs into weeping contortions that
