The Growing is the thing Observer Food Monthly editor Allan Jenkins contemplates the joy of growing for growing’s sake

For Allan Jenkins gardening is all about loving soil, helping it to live and holding the hand of the land

Irecently spent a Sunday morning planting 150 tulips I’ll likely never see. They are sitting huddled now in the sandy ground of the Danish seaside summerhouse I try to visit every six weeks or so. Sometimes the timing works and there they will be in late spring, clustered, bloomed, some standing to attention, scarlet as a soldier’s uniform. More often, though, they will be in too-tight bud or else will have been and gone. A few rusty petals in the grass to show they were there. And I am good with that. I don’t need, you see, to see them; it makes me happy to know they’re there. I grow mostly trees there, beech and birch; I may never see them reach maturity, though the spurt of the larch always amazes.

Even at my shared London allotment, Plot 29, it’s the joy of growing rather than the food that’s the thing. I leave amaranth to express itself with swooning seedheads rather than pick at it. I leave most of the chicory to spike and spiral like a flamenco skirt before it bursts into blue-eyed flower. I leave the painted mountain corn as long as I can so I can share the pleasure of opening it like a present. For me harvesting is almost a sideshow, a side effect, to the pleasure of nurturing plants. Though I obsess over seed, of course.

My growing is a meditation on love and loss that comes with edible leaves. For Mary, the tenant of Plot 29, seed packets are a pact with the future. They helped her recover from cancer. For me they are still shaped like hope, and at only £2 a throw. It was through seeds I think I learned to love as a child: to look after plants like I once wasn’t. I am nurture, you see, not nature (or so I thought before I unearthed my mother and my long-dead father). I first learned to grow seed as a five-year-old. My foster father gave my brother marigold seed, though I don’t think he ever grew them – or anything else much – again. Dad gave me magical nasturtium seed and I now grow its gaudy flowers (as well as marigolds) every year though I thought it hippy, happy companion planting until I dug deep into my past after my brother died.

I grow biodynamically, with buried cow manure, full dusk and dawn stirrings. I follow the inconvenient lunar calendar. It’s an antidote to working in national newspapers: using my heart instead of my head, faith instead of thinking, although it always works. Our sorrel is more sour, our beetroots sweeter, our salads last longer, some of our amaranth grows three metres tall.

My gardening is about loving soil, if you will, and helping it live. My job is to create conditions where the plants want to grow. Gardening is a yoga: my breathing slows, my heart rate too, my anxieties begin to slip away. I always seem to leave the plot centred, my mood always healed.

It is not about taking, it’s almost holding the land’s hand. Like any relationship, it is about attention, putting in the work, loving to get love back. Sometimes I just pop by the plot to say hello, or goodbye if I am going away.

I never make sowing plans or diagrams. Strange as it sounds, I stand with packets of seed or hazel poles and try to feel where things should grow. I realise that to many gardeners this may sound deranged; I don’t believe in imposing my will on the land, but I do believe in listening (in a way) to what the plot has to say. I find happiness in small successes, in trying to help create a magical space.

I pick occasional flowers, salads, kale and chard leaves, tear peas and many types of bean. I dig early potatoes, various beetroot and carrots and bring them home like any other farmer-hunter-gatherer. I love to eat and share the crops but it is not the prime reason I grow. I find peace among peas, solace in sorrel, a home in homegrown. It is a feeling I am growing, not food.

Gardening roots me to my past and my future. My daughter lives just a few doors away. I overlook her flower garden. I order in (too many) annual seeds and we sow them as close as possible to her birthday in mid- May. There are always tithonia, sunflowers, multicoloured banks of cosmos, and of course rambling nasturtiums and marigolds. I have a jar of them on my desk as I write this.

I watch Kala deadheading her flowers. I hear her screaming at spiders in the shed. I see her nasturtiums invading the neighbours’ gardens despite their best efforts to cut them back.

Every year we carefully save flower seed, though I will never stop buying her more (see my earlier reflections on hope). I scour garden catalogues in winter like others thumb through summer holiday brochures. I grow Mediterranean and sow Asia and central America, row by row. I travel the world, plant by plant, leaf by leaf.

At its heart, I hope, Plot 29 is an enchanted place to get almost lost in. A garden where, perhaps, a small boy can turn brown winter soil into vibrant spring colour, or play hide and seek among giant, coloured corn and amaranth.