Blue roses and peonies on upper arm

I am writing about the roses in the bed under Block C, because on Tuesday you told me they were a council matter and I have decided to make them mine. Nobody has pruned them since the spring. The peonies by the bin store have gone to brown mush, but the blue ones keep pushing up through the railings as if someone had promised them something.

I should explain about the blue. My late husband Derek swore the colour came from a tin of dye he bought off a man at Dudley market in 1979, and that he planted the first bush himself the night before our wedding so I would have something to look at from the landing. I never believed him. But every July for thirty-odd years I have stood at the kitchen window on the fourteenth floor and watched those petals open, purple at the edges and teal at the heart, and I have not once thought it was a lie.

The lads from the flats on the ground floor have been cutting them for their girlfriends again, so I have started going down with my secateurs before breakfast. This morning I found the bush nearest the bins had been stripped to the thorns, and a single bloom lying on the step with its head turned up like it was waiting for someone to notice. I have wrapped a cutting from the healthy side in a damp tea towel and I am taking it down in the lift now.

If the council wants to make something of it, you know where I am. Fourteenth floor, the window with the sill full of tins.

Yours sincerely, Maureen Doyle