I was 13 when my mum met my stepfather, Harry. He had been widowed for many years, his own daughter was grown, with a child of her own. Yet he didn’t blink an eye at the thought of taking on a teenage girl – and the slammed doors and loud music that came with her.

New families can be tough places to find your footing in. But Harry’s patience, and his steaming plates of shepherd’s pie, helped to soothe my ache for the harsher northern accents and urban landscapes that had shaped my childhood, as we moved from one end of the country to the other.

We found common ground in our love of animals and late-night television – Last of the Summer Wine, It’ll be Alright in the Night and Tenko, our particular favourites.

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Over the months our positions at opposite ends of the sofa slowly shifted. Inch by inch. Until we found ourselves meeting comfortably in the middle, as his home became my home too.

An avid gardener, he grew all of our vegetables and propagated his own flowers in the rural oasis he had created at my new home in Devon, exhibiting the roses he named after my mum at the Chelsea Flower Show.

Yet as his blooms grew bigger and brighter, within a few short seasons of our move, Harry began to fade. His digging became slower and his tea breaks longer. The pockets of the trousers that once held his secateurs and pruners hanging lower as he began treatment for the illness the doctors told him would, sooner rather than later, take him away from the green, green grass of his garden.

As his illness progressed, his world became smaller.

He moved downstairs into a hospital bed that replaced the mahogany dining table in the ‘good room’, pushed up against the window so he could still look out over the borders he had planted.

Then the seed catalogues began to arrive. Their glossy pages, thick with promise, thudding satisfyingly onto the doormat.

Unable to get his fingers into the soil, Harry took up a thick black felt-tip instead as he circled names with care – Gardener’s Delight, Thumbelina, Dragon’s Tongue – just as he used to ring television programmes in the Radio Times.

Asking my advice as though it mattered enormously, he ordered seeds in an act of gentle resistance – determination to leave a little of himself behind. Perhaps hoping that he too, like the catalogues promised, would show excellent resistance and come back again next year.

The little family he helped re-root has now grown far beyond the reach of the garden he once tended

Despite mum’s tutting – a practical woman who could barely disguise her irritation at what she saw as his fruitless forward planning – he persisted.

And, with me happily complicit, trotting up and down to the post box with the envelopes containing his shakily signed cheques, he continued to order hope for the price of a packet of seeds and a stamp. Both of us joined in this act of quiet faith: that something wished for in the cold days of winter would answer in the warmer days of spring.

By the time the small, rattling packets of seeds landed on the doormat, Harry had died.

In the comforting quiet of his potting shed, away from mum’s red eyes, I followed the tiny printed instructions with care. Wishing he were there to correct my spacing, to tell me not to over-water. Wishing I had listened more. Just wishing…

It helped, in that first year when our grief was as raw as newly turned earth, to see the green tips of his love push up in pots and planters, as the greenhouse gifted us the fruit and vegetables he made sure would be there to nourish us. The bittersweet taste of his love, and our loss.

The little family he helped re-root has now grown far beyond the reach of the garden he once tended. Yet this time every year, as shoots push through the soil and the first flowers unfurl, I find him there – flowering and fruiting - in all that continues to grow.