There was no room on the pavement. People in suits passed in the opposite direction, eyes on their screens, their bags smacking into me. It was the height of summer, heat bounced off the concrete and the air rose in waves. Mud clung to my clothes and my new steel caps were rubbing raw blisters into my feet. I was tired and desperate to get home. Strangers would glance at me before quickly looking away – I must have looked so odd – this dishevelled girl limping around, everyone in their crisp shirts and nice shoes.

We were living in Ben’s office in central London. After Covid hit, he made half of his company redundant. To save money he stopped taking a salary and we moved into the office from our 2 bed house in the suburbs. It had two floors, so we claimed the top one as our new ‘home’. The main meeting room became our bedroom; we plugged a portable electric hob into a desk in the room next door and took cold showers in the bathroom that no one ever used.

Milo and Me, looking out to the Shard at night.

As I reached the building, two of Ben’s colleagues stepped out and I couldn’t avoid them this time. I said a quick hello and edged past, knowing I probably stank of sweat and that they knew it too. I used to be one of these people. I’d had a good corporate career, the kind with meetings and nice clothes. Maybe that life would have made more sense now all this was happening. I’d just started my first gardening job. I could still feel the day in my back having spent it digging and raking heavy clay soil. But inside, there was a lightness. A silence where my mind had once been loud – a calm where it had been busy. I’d started working for a quiet and kind man, smart in a different kind of way that I hadn’t encountered before. I’d known for the longest time that I’d been lost – I just didn’t know where to go instead.

I reached the top of the 5th flight of stairs and used my shoulder to open the heavy office door. As if our privacy wasn’t already gone, big windows covered the walls. I dropped every bit of weight I had on me, slumped into the nearest broken desk chair and wheeled it over to catch some of the hot breeze. The Shard stared back, the tallest skyscraper in London, firing sunlight into my face and illuminating every bit of dry dirt still stuck to my forehead. I could see the people working next door looking back at me as if to say —“Do you live there?”

I hadn’t considered Gardening as a job before. Maybe I thought gardening was boring when I was younger – or that other people would think I was boring. It didn’t seem like a “high-achieving” job. You go to college and get a degree to get an office job … why would you become a gardener? But all that was on the surface. All that was what other people thought. I felt more at home outside in space that connected me with everything else. Outside I could throw love into the open air over and over and have it return to me. Beneath the surface I wanted to be a part of the landscape – to at least discover where it was that I belonged.