A decent display of nerines, like the blaze of pink by our front steps. I’m sure I only ever bought six of them – six is about my maximum for anything – but there they are, bright as a four-year old girl’s party dress.

That is the secret of gardening. Time. And faith. Faith that the dead stick you plant now will turn into an apple tree in spring, and that the apple tree will be big enough in four years time to give you apples, and so large in a decade that your friends will be hunting out recipes for apple cake and apple crumble.

Faith that bulbs will multiply, unless your soil is badly drained or lacking humus and nematodes. Faith that a couple of leaves and a skinny root, almost too thin to see, will grow into a fat red cabbage, big enough to serve 10 people, or a speck of seed turn into a tomato plant almost as tall as you.

It was faith, and hope, that led me to plant camellias here, year after year, never more than six at once, given how slowly anything grows here, including camellias. Now they are taller and wider than I am, and laden with flowers, and the bougainvillea that came back as a cutting from a friend’s garden up north – planted with more hope than faith, that one – is now covering half the shed and still flagrant purple, not having noticed it’s winter.

Winter is the season for gardeners to have faith and a small amount of arithmetical ability – enough to know that doubling a plant or bulb collection every year eventually leads to lots. This is the time to put in bare-rooted trees, rhubarb roots and artichoke suckers (the seedlings might not come true to type and you will end up with more thistle than succulent artichoke heart).

It is a time for dreaming, too. What would you love most? A cherry tree, with sun-warmed fruit hat has never lost its perfect sweetness in a cold store? Apricots, which you need to grow yourself, as they don’t get any sweeter after being picked from the tree, but if you try to transport them ripe you end up with sludge and bruises? Climbing roses or great bunches of long-stemmed hybrid teas to stuff in vases and to give away? This is the time for dreaming, faith and planting.

* Watching camellia after camellia bush slide into bloom;

* still picking cherry tomatoes in the most sheltered bed (they only ripen inside, but new ones keep forming and they’re not bad either);

* adding finely chopped garlic tops to soups and stews;

* deciding I’ll stick to orange carrots next year – the purple, yellow and red-skinned ones don’t have the same sweetness;

* trying to convince the wombats that five carrots can be divided evenly among five wombats; and

* digging up and relishing the first parsnips of the season.