This is a piece which appeared in The Telegraph and is behind a paywall. So I am republishing it here.

I don’t know why other people garden or make gardens. I think they like the activity. But I wanted a garden and gardening was the only way to get one. Now, after a long time, I have one.

Once a book is published it tends to remain largely unaltered. If you are a sculptor you sculpt, stop, and there is the sculpture. Barring accidents, it should remain. But a garden is only ever a struggle and a dialogue between you and all garden constituents.

Plants, insects and ravening beasties, winter weather, fungal diseases – all the stuff that makes for the hard work, worry and problems.

On the other side there is growth – an extraordinary thing. We buy a green object, shove it in the ground and then, if we are lucky, it gets bigger and changes shape and generally demonstrates a life of its own – and yet we don’t fall over in astonishment.

There is growth, and plants that offer great delight, and there are misty, mysterious mornings; sunshiny days with friends; frost picking out edges in winter, and snow smothering the lot, blurring the boundaries.

Then there is light. Light is your greatest partner of all in the garden. No matter what you do, however well you employ your resources and create scenes of splendour and delight, it is light that will transform it all into beauty. Frost or snow lies flat until someone turns the light on. Suddenly there is joy and beauty.

It’s quite hard to know what to do with all this when you have it. It can be quite overwhelming. I can look up from my desk and see spring sun pointing out the glow of a tree, as demanding as any teacher requiring a response. It makes me want to wave my arms about, jump up and down or rush around mindlessly. What to do to express how I feel at this amazing, ephemeral, joyous sight?

I get my camera out. I know photography has a bad press. It is supposed to stop us really looking at things, a substitute for gold-plated “experience”. Cheating and being touristy. I tell myself off – but I still grab the camera and run.

And I have realised that, embarrassing as it is to say this, it provides a form of devotion, even, sacrilegious as it is to suggest such a thing, a form of worship.

Or, looking at it another way, I am like a child in a sweet shop wanting “that one” and “that one”, desperate to grab every sweet thing going, while I have the opportunity.

I start hunting, pacing the garden and looking for the next pictures. The wonder of digital is that I don’t have to ration myself, though the time taken to process the pictures later reprimands me. It is still a kind of extravagance.

Light moves, you have to follow it, see where it takes you. It shines through trees, creating a curious 3D effect. You would have thought 3D was how you see things anyway but suddenly a tree is no longer a flat outline but has depth and layers.

So I look up, and I look down. My camera is curiously random (meaning I haven’t properly understood the thing yet). Sometimes I can capture the detail of a flower, a leaf or a fly close up. Sometimes it stays relentlessly and depressingly blurred at the edges.

You can see how careless I am with all this. It is almost as if the act of taking the picture is enough to express what I need to express. I live with a professional garden photographer. He doesn’t rush out like this or take mad, chancy shots. It takes him time and consideration to gather his equipment and get out there, and then he’s on a different trail. He’s hunting for the saleable image.

No rushing, this is a serious, considered act and it takes time. I sometimes rush ahead, take a picture and rush back to show him a possibility. Sometimes it passes muster and he will take an infinitely better version. We are doing very different things.

You can create your own light. I have also taken pictures in the dark. Point and hope – or wear a torch. The flash shows me magical sights and silhouettes. Falling snow is very special.

I do gather treasure this way. I use garden pictures on two websites. On a screen they are shrunk and lit up by the screen itself. I can get away with a lot. But none of that is, I realise, the point.

I have hundreds of pictures I will never use for anything except a despairing or occasionally gloating review on my computer. Taking them is the critical act. It is a kind of loving, a way of expressing how I feel about the garden.

And, yes, I take dozens of pictures of my husband too. All this is very un-British. Really ought to stick to talking about slugs.