Orange lily tattoo in colour

The bulbs came over on the Tuesday boat, wrapped in wet sacking and smelling of the mainland's diesel, and I have spent three days on my knees in the glasshouse sorting the ones that had gone soft from the ones that might still wake. Mr Penhallow says the orange kind won't survive our winters out in the open, so they go under glass, in the old tomato trench, where the sea wind can't get at them. I told him the sea wind is the only thing that ever got at anything on this island, and he laughed the way he does when he hasn't understood me.

You'll remember the lily that grew up through the wall by the chapel, the one the storm took last autumn. I went down after the gale with a bucket, thinking I'd rescue what was left, and found it flattened but not broken, its petals scorched red at the edges where the salt had caught them. Its stamens were still standing up like little brass pins, each with a dab of pollen as bright as a struck match. I stood there in the mud for longer than I care to admit.

So I've brought one home. It's in the window now, six petals open wide, the yellow bleeding up through the orange like sunrise through a sheet. I keep thinking it looks like it's trying to hold its breath and shout at once. I'll send you a cutting when it sets seed. Don't let Dad tell you it can't be done.

Your loving sister, Jenny