Scotland, 1970

I made my first necklace when I was four. My mother helped my inexpert little hands string together carrots, gooseberries, beans and tomatoes.  The necklace, together with a miniature garden assembled from twigs and ferns, moss and stones, perched in a dirt-filled metal biscuit tin, comprised my entry in the children’s section of the Helensburgh Agricultural Show.

This was a family affair. We were living with my grandparents for the summer, an hour out of Glasgow on Scotland’s Atlantic coast. My grandfather, an enthusiastic horticulturist with an irritating competitive streak, was aiming for a podium finish in the Open Begonia Division. On the day the prizes were awarded, we sidled along rows of entries, and saw little cards that proclaimed I had two “firsts”. As we walked through, a little girl was dragging her dad along saying, like a baby Billy Connolly, “mine was all carrots”. Applying all my four-year-old fashion wisdom I thought, “that's silly. If you only used carrots in your necklace, it will never win; there isn't enough variety.”

Which was right. I and another girl tied for the trophy. It was more than forty years before it occurred to me to wonder: did any boys other than me enter that competition?