How often we have to thank the sense of beauty of some former country worker for sparing a sapling when cutting a hedge or taking a slip of some doomed tree and setting it ‘quick i’ the earth’ to bloom for those who have come after.

A very old wisteria rose snaking over an arbour. Nearby were tiny roses on a wall, mere tufty buttons that smelled of one’s childhood in a horse-pace village. Thin bricks were set on edge around a bed of irises, bricks which had been stamped on by Tudor horses, when they had formed the floor of the old stables. Traces of them could be seen also in the path in the churchyard, like the backs of small old books packed in a bookshelf.

There was wonder in that insubstantial pointer; it gave me news that no clockwork could do. Time was not a fixed series of moments, it said, but something moving like a flower that grows, growing perhaps even like a flower; or traveling the minutes like the spokes of a shadowy wheel turning once a day, and perhaps going somewhere or somewhen, carrying me along with it