I have always been a reluctant gardener. Though, as a child I would get lost in building and rebuilding road networks amongst the dug-up potato beds, and improvising stories, characters and other worlds, against the backdrop our one-acre plot in rural Aberdeenshire.

Half a century later, my partner Catharine and I have our very own grown-up garden with mature trees, shrubs and everything. This one calls out. It says ‘tend me, fix me, weed me, nourish me and landscape me! My 10-year-old self-re-emerged; I’ve been landscaping, building paths, sheds, and raised beds while Catharine worked magic planning and planting.

Covid had already made our world smaller, and in a year when it looked like things were opening up, the energy crisis, Ukraine, Brexit and populism, all seemed to make my garden world all the more a sanctuary.

Through 2021, with working from home the new normal, I made a daily drawing for 100 days in our garden, searching for stories, characters, contexts, and histories. Each directly observed from life and taking around half an hour in fibre pens on brown paper. I next developed these drawings into backdrops for an improvised and deliberately clunky narrative animation about the trials of a family of gardeners pitted against a ‘Garden Inspectorate’ hellbent on closing their garden down, reflecting our present world as it leaps from one existential crisis to another.