People have noticed our poppies. They are growing large and strong in one of the tree pits on the station forecourt, along with beautiful orange marigolds. There are three different colours: a flame red, a deep burgundy and a lilac pink.

Yesterday, we saw a lovely post on the neighbourhood WhatsApp in appreciation of the poppies, thanking us ‘for bringing joy to the daily commute’.

I hardly dare confess that we have done very little to create this glorious display. We just let the self-seeded flowers grow. It’s extraordinary how seeds will suddenly activate.

I remember the lilac pink poppy seeds were given to us at a street party back in 2012. Over the years, these poppies have ‘popped’ up and we’ve scattered seed at the end of the season. The burgundy ones came in a free packet with a gardening magazine, again a long time ago. The flame red ones? Well, they’ve just dropped by on the breeze.

We’ve planted marigolds over the years and saved the seeds. There’s also a prehistoric-looking yellow verbascum (mullein), again self seeded from plants we grew years ago and perhaps even from the original inhabitants of our edible plot when it was a sad bit of neglected waste land. I suspect seeds also end up in our compost.

But it’s funny how the flowers we didn’t sow this year are the best: the seeds have been biding their time in the soil and obviously this year’s warm conditions have been to their liking.

This serendipity is the joy (and sometimes the pain) of gardening. In the case of the poppies, I think we can take credit for … benign neglect.