Fen was twelve, and she was the water-keeper's daughter at the Ashgrove garden, which meant she counted barrows of rain, cleaned the sluice gratings, and swept the beds nobody else admitted to sweeping. The garden kept a book. It was a small green book, a hundred years old, and the last thirty pages of it were dates: first buttercup, first coltsfoot, first snowdrop, first daffodil, first leaf. Nobody had written in it for two years, because the man who wrote the dates had retired and the man who took his place did not think it mattered.

Fen thought it mattered a great deal. So on the twelfth of February, when she knelt at the long border with a cold hand to pull a weed and found a snowdrop in flower, she wrote it in. "It is early," she said.

Mr. Sallow, who had been the head gardener for twenty years and had opinions, looked at the book, and looked at the flower, and said, "Eleven days. That is the third year running that it has got earlier, and nobody has written that down since the man retired, and now you have. A date in a book is a rumour, miss, until somebody goes out in the cold and stands over it."

The corner she found it in was walled, and the wall was older than the town hall, and the ground inside it was called the Dower Ground, and nothing in it grew in rows. It grew in drifts. Old bulbs lay three deep. There was a paved path in it, and the path was under the beds, and the beds had come up over the path in the way that a thing comes up over a thing when nobody moves it.

On the night of the fourteenth, with a lantern and a cold hand, Fen went in alone, because the gate squeaked and she could not get anyone to come with her without explaining why. The snowdrop was not in the frost. It was in a place where the ground was bare and the soil stood up in a small mound, and it was the only flower in the Dower Ground in February. "You are early too," Fen said. "I am the earliest," said the snowdrop. "There is a difference. The others follow me and think they are early, and then they are late and disappointed." "Are you talking?"

"I am talking to the only person who has come here at night since the wall was mended," said the flower. "Which was a woman, in the spring, with a lantern, sixty years ago. She stood where you are standing. She was writing." "She was writing in the book." "She wrote: first snowdrop, the twelfth, the Dower Ground. It is the first entry in the whole book that names a place. Before that, the book only says the garden." The snowdrop turned its face a little. "Do you know what this ground does?" "No."

"It does not lose time. It keeps it. A hundred springs went by in here between one dusk and the next, a long time ago, and every one of them is still here, in the beds, one on top of another, and the bulbs on top are what you can see." The stem straightened. "There is nobody in here. That is the other thing I should tell you, because people always think that. There is nobody in here and there never was. There is a wall, and a path, and a hundred years of somebody doing work." "What work?"

"The wall was built so that one piece of ground could be given to somebody and be hers alone, and kept, and not sold," said the snowdrop. "Somebody stood here for a hundred springs and did the only thing there is to do with ground, which was to keep it. And now the council has written to say it is untidy."

The council wrote that the Dower Ground would be levelled in April for a new walk. Surveyor Peart, who was not a villain, and who was a man who liked his instruments in a straight line, put it in his report as untidiness. "It is not untidy," Fen said, when she was allowed to attend and speak, which took three letters and her father's wages as surety. "It is a hundred years of garden that happens to be out of date."

"It is a corner with a wall round it," said Mr. Peart, "in which nothing can be planted in a straight line, and the town has paid for a straight walk." "Then it is older than your walk." "By how much?" That was the question, and she had four days to answer it, and the answer was not in the Dower Ground at all.

The parish accounts were kept in a chest under the vestry stairs, and they were in the hand of three clerks over two centuries, and she went through them for two nights with a candle and a list of everything the parish had ever paid for, which is a longer list than anyone imagines. And on the fourteenth page of the year sixty-one years ago, in the middle of an entry about a water butt, there was a mason named Ottry Selby. It reads: mason, to the old garden wall, north side, reset and re-laid, three days, twelve shillings.

"That is the wall," said Mr. Peart, when she brought him the page, because he was a fair man and a mason is a mason. "That is the same wall, inside and out. Sixty years." "And the walk is new this year." "Then I cannot take a hundred years off a wall I have not measured," said Mr. Peart, and put his pencil down, which from Mr. Peart was the whole of the speech.

The town meeting took an hour. The vote was close, and the walk was diverted, and it went round the wall the long way, which adds four minutes to it and which nobody has ever mentioned since.

Then Fen did the part she had not been asked to do and could not have done alone. She lifted the drift in the Dower Ground with a trowel and a hand fork, which is a week of work by one person, and she divided the bulbs, which she was taught to do, and she set them in a new bed along the outside of the wall, on the side the sun reaches, where the ground is warm enough and shallow enough and the county had nothing that was better for it.

So the early snowdrop stopped being a secret in a walled corner, and became the first thing anybody saw when they came through the gates on a cold morning in February, and the gardeners put a bench near it, which is the sort of thing a town does when it has decided something is ordinary. Mr. Sallow gave her the green book, because he was retiring again, in name. "Put the date in first," he said, "before the flower. There is a difference between a record and a memory, and a memory can be argued with."

She ruled a new page and wrote the first line: the twelfth of February, the twelfth of March, the fourth of April, and every year after, and at the head of the page she drew the border and the wall and the little mound with nothing on it yet, because the year was young, and there was a space left on the right for the day the flower actually came, to be filled in by whoever was there.

The book lives in the tool shed, on a shelf, under the whetstone, in green cloth, and it is not locked, and in the last week of every February the gardener's boy borrows it and comes out of the gate before the light and walks the long way round the wall to the bench, and writes the date, and goes back in. On the twelfth of February there was no flower at all. There was a cold wet morning and a hard blue sky and frost still in the shadow of the wall.

At noon, at the bench, a gardener's boy of about nine stood next to a woman in a gardening coat, and between them on the bed of new bulbs, one small white flower was open.