The Inventory

Mara was cataloguing the garden when the man from the council arrived.

She was on her knees by the rhubarb, counting the new crowns - three this year, up from one - when his shadow fell across the bed. She didn't look up. She'd been up since five, the air still cold, the soil cold under her knees, and she'd learned that if you looked up at every person who arrived, you'd never finish the count.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning," she said.

He had a clipboard. She could see it in her peripheral vision. Brown shoes, grey trousers, a clipboard. The clipboard meant he wanted something.

"I'm from the council," he said. "We're doing an inventory of allotment holdings."

"I'm doing an inventory of allotment holdings," Mara said.

He paused. She kept counting. Four, five. The fifth crown was small, barely a thumb's worth of red breaking the soil.

"I mean a formal inventory. For the records."

Mara sat back on her heels and looked at him. He was young. He had the face of someone who had been told where to go and what to do when he got there, and was doing his best. She felt for him. She also felt for the rhubarb.

"What do you need?" she said.

"Plant listings. Square footage. Any structures. Water sources."

"I have all of that," she said. "I keep it in the shed."

The shed was at the back of the plot. It was made of corrugated iron and reclaimed wood and had been there longer than Mara had. It leaned. Everything on this allotment leaned - the shed, the fence, the bean poles, the fruit trees. Not because anything was broken, but because the wind came from the west and everything grew around it.

She stood up and wiped her hands on her trousers. She walked toward the shed. He followed.

Inside, the shed smelled like dry soil and string. Mara had a notebook on a shelf made from a plank and two bricks. She took it down and opened it.

"What's that?" he said.

"This is the inventory," she said.

The notebook was a school exercise book, the kind with lines and a margin. On the first page, in Mara's handwriting, it said: *Mara's Plot - Allotment 14 - Started March 2022*.

The pages that followed were a list. Not a formal list - a lived one. Each page was a year, and each year was a catalogue of what grew, what didn't, what was eaten, what was given away, what was lost to frost, what was lost to slugs, what was lost to the fox that dug up the onions in October. The entries were dated. Some were crossed out. Some had additions in a different colour ink.

Under 2024, it said:

*Rhubarb - 5 crowns (3 new). Victoria variety. Crown 5 still small, give it another year.* *Bees - saw three on the lavender. One looked tired.* *Joe's tomatoes - gave him six seedlings. He lost four to damping off. Gave him four more. He lost two. He said thank you.* *The man who doesn't talk - he has plot 9. He grows only potatoes. I have never seen him smile. His potatoes are excellent.* *Compost - turned March 14, April 2, April 19. Hot enough to steam.* *Fox - back. Dug up the onion bed. I put chicken wire down. The fox moved to plot 11. The man from plot 11 came to talk to me about it. We looked at the damage together. He said, "That's the fox." I said, "That's the fox." We stood there for a while.* *Slugs - lost the lettuce. Lost the marigolds. Did not lose the brassicas because I put the copper tape down. The copper tape cost four pounds. The brassicas are worth more than four pounds. This is economics.* *The plum tree - three fruit this year. Three. I watched them for four months. Two fell. I ate the third. It was the best plum I have ever eaten. I am not being sentimental. It was a very good plum.*

The council man read over her shoulder. He was quiet for a long time.

"This is... very detailed," he said.

"It's my plot," Mara said.

"I can see that."

"Do you want me to copy it onto your form?"

He looked at his clipboard. The form had columns: *Plant Type. Quantity. Area (m²). Condition.*

"The form doesn't really have a column for..." he paused. "For any of this."

Mara looked at the form. She looked at her notebook. She looked at the form again.

"You could put 'rhubarb' in the Plant Type column," she said. "And '5' in the Quantity column. But you'd be missing the point."

"Which is?"

"The point is the third crown that didn't come up and the fifth crown that did and the two years between them when I thought the whole bed was dead and it wasn't. The point is the plum."

He wrote something on his clipboard. She couldn't see what.

"The plum," he said. "Where would I put the plum?"

Mara thought about this. Outside, the wind moved through the bean poles. She could hear the rhubarb leaves brushing each other, the way they did when the air changed direction.

"You'd put it under 'Other,'" she said.

"Other," he repeated.

"Other. The category for things that don't fit anywhere else. The third plum in four months. The fox that comes back. The man who doesn't talk but grows the best potatoes on the site. The four pounds of copper tape. The bee that looked tired."

He looked at her. She looked at him. He was young, and he was trying, and the clipboard wasn't his fault.

"Can I keep a copy of your notebook?" he said.

"No," she said. "But I can read you the plum entry."

He turned to a fresh page on his clipboard. She read:

*"The plum tree - three fruit this year. Three. I watched them for four months. Two fell. I ate the third. It was the best plum I have ever eaten. I am not being sentimental. It was a very good plum."*

He wrote it down. All of it. In the margin, outside the columns.

"That's not really how the form works," he said.

"I know," she said. "But that's the plum."

He left after twenty minutes. He had the rhubarb count and the square footage and the water source (a tap at the edge of the site, shared with plot 13). He also had the plum, written in the margin, outside the columns, where it didn't belong and where it belonged.

Mara went back to the rhubarb. She was up to crown five. She put her hands in the dirt beside it and felt the cold and the wet and the slow red pushing up through both.

She stayed there for a while. The garden didn't need her to do anything. The garden was doing it. She was just the one who counted.