Heart of leaves and roses on the ankle

Nineteen years ago Mrs Hollis walked the lane below Carrow Hill with a pair of secateurs in one hand and a ball of green garden twine in the other. She was cutting briar for a wedding nobody in the village believed would happen, because the bride's family and the groom's had not spoken since a boundary wall fell over in a gale. She cut the stems long, with the leaves still on, and she cut three wild roses where the hedge was thickest, the pink ones that smell of boiled sweets.

She bent the stems round her knee, one turn after another, and found that they wanted to make a heart, which she told everyone was the briar's idea and not hers. Each rose she tied at a curve so it would sit at the top where the two lobes meet. When she had done it she looked at it and said, 'Well, that's a daft shape to give a farmer,' and went home. The wreath went on the chapel gate that Saturday, and the two fathers, standing either side of it, both reached for the same rose and their fingers touched, and that was that.

Now, the wall was rebuilt by the spring, and the heart is still on the gate, though the briar has grown into the iron and you can hardly tell where the one stops. Mrs Hollis is in the churchyard under a rose of her own. Lift your glasses to the bride and groom, and to the fathers, and to the briar, which never once asked anyone to be sensible.