Paradise garden

In the Quran, the garden is a symbol of paradise, and it's easy to understand why.

I've been lucky - most of my life I've had a garden, or been close to a public garden. My son's first outing, a week after he was born, was to the rose garden in Preston Park. I took Giya there too, as a new baby.

The children rolled down the sloping lawn at Mum's in Tunbridge Wells, we came home with bunches of flowers in summer. And now in Brighton, I've had my own garden for about 23 years. In fact, Risenga and I decided on the house I live in because of the apple tree in the back and the flint wall.

The garden's been the place of children's parties, teenage parties and quiet, early sun. Amampondo - Nelson Mandela's favourite group - played marimbas outside one June and when Risenga was giving drumming lessons years ago, he'd stretch goat skin and tighten his drums there.

The garden's entered poems as if it owned them, as the allotment, up the hill, does too.

Last week I was in Vauxhall Gardens - a far cry from the pleasure gardens known to Hogarth - writing poems based on conversations with people wandering through or stopping at the temporary shed that advertised me as poet in the garden.

The late Sarah Maguire was a trained gardener and wonderful poet. In fact many poets I know are gardeners. It seems we need a break from words.

It is a challenge writing poems to order, after passing conversations with strangers, sometimes only the length of the path through the garden.

 I wasn't quite the poet for hire, tapping out lines on the spot for those who wanted them. Apart from a poem for Valentine's Day, commissioned by the friend of a man who'd forgotten to get anything for his partner.

But a selection of what I wrote will be on display at the Garden Museum in March, alongside photos of the park and perhaps of me chatting to people with dogs or children in the drizzle.