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The very first thing she did when we moved in was to run into the garden, hands in the air, as if she’d just scored the winning goal in a cup final and shouted, “I just love this garden!”

She turned to me with the broadest of smiles and said, “It’s ours. It’s actually ours.”

She said that pretty much where I’m sitting now—just outside the patio doors, which lead to the kitchen.

She was always more interested in the garden than the house. She kept saying that it had so much potential. I could see her planning borders and vistas in her mind as we were shown around. She hardly looked at the rooms.

And as she flung her arms around me all those years ago, kissing me excitedly, ignoring the celebratory champagne that I was holding out for her, she whispered, “This is a garden to fuck in.”

Eventually she took the glass and raised it towards me. “We are going to have such fun out here.”

And she was so fucking right. We had a ball.

The first thing she wanted to do in the garden after we’d moved in was to create a wild flower area. She always liked meadows with the red of the poppies clashing with the bright blue of the cornflowers, held together with the frothy blooms of cow parsley and wild carrot.

Nothing could sum her up better than that meadow she created in the area on the brow of the small hill. Colourful. Wild. Natural. Like those wildflowers, she grabbed any opportunity to grow and flourish.

Not that the rest of the garden was wild. It had several different areas, each reflecting parts of her character.

Looking back, my personal favourite was the cottage border near the patio. It was more formal that the meadow, packed with perennials. Delphiniums, irises, geraniums, lady’s mantle. All neatly layered in clumps.

But, to be honest, it wasn’t really the flowers that did it for me. It was one particular memory of what we did there, which was anything but formal.

It was a warm June morning and she’d rushed out of the house upon waking and spent the first few hours pulling out a few weeds and sharing cups of tea with the birds, listening to their calls and being part of nature. She slept nude and she’d not bothered to dress. She didn’t need to, given the temperature. And she loved being naked outside.

I caught her walking back to the kitchen to make another brew. She looked so hot—magnificent boobs, curvy arse. She scolded me for missing the best part of the day as she filled the kettle.

“Join me on the patio,” she said. I was about to throw on some clothes first, but she made it very clear that we should be out in nature, as nature intended.