Two facing profiles with a knotted heart

I hope the cuttings reached you in good order, though I expect the post has been as slow as everything else this spring. You will have heard by now that the wall is down between our two gardens. Mrs Okafor and I took the trowels to it ourselves on Saturday, and I am writing to tell you what we found behind it, because you were the one who planted the box.

Thirty years of box, Mr Ashdown. Your side grew out in its heavy green shoulders and hers grew up like a pair of raised hands, and where the two met over the old brick they had knotted themselves together into a heart. I had thought the heart was a trick of the clippers. It is not. Someone trained those stems on a frame of galvanised wire, year after year, and the loops are so tight that I could not get a fingernail between them.

We have agreed to leave the knot standing. Hers will be the left-hand profile and yours the right, facing each other across the gap where the wall was, and the tips of the leaves almost touch at the middle. I have tried to explain to the council that it is a feature and not an encroachment, and they have asked me to send a photograph, which I have not yet done because I cannot decide which way the light should fall.

Come on Sunday and cut the other side with me. I have kept the shears oiled.

Yours in clippings, Margaret Ferrier