Flower and snowflake on upper back

The hellebores came up through the last of the snow on Tuesday, the way you said they would if I stopped fussing over them. I didn't believe you. I went out with the trowel anyway, and there they were, nodding under the holly as if they'd been waiting for someone to notice. Your grandmother's bench is still under the damson, though the wood has gone grey and soft. I sat on it with my tea and didn't mind the cold.

Something else I should tell you. The man from the nursery brought round a box of old seed packets with looping lettering, and in the bottom there was a drawing of a flower opening like a pair of cupped hands. Beside it he'd sketched a snowflake, pencilled so lightly I took it for a smudge. He said it was a cutting from the Ashgrove estate, lost since the war. I asked how he knew. He only shrugged and said a snowflake is the one thing in a garden that never grows the same twice.

I wrote that down so I wouldn't forget it, then I forgot it, then the frost came back and I found the note in the pocket of your old coat. Last night the frost lay on the greenhouse glass in sharp little diamonds, and I thought of that drawing. I went out with the torch and crouched by the bed where the flower had gone to seed. The stem was bent, and something had been feeding on it, or the cold had got in. But a single flake had settled in the centre, perfect and small, and it hadn't melted in the torchlight.

I left it there. I'm writing from the bench now, with a seed head in my palm, to ask whether you'll come up in March and help me save what's left. Bring the good secateurs. Bring your patience, which I'm told you have in short supply.

Love, Gran