Summer is here and the lilies are blooming. The graceful and poisonous datura flowers are hanging down like pink hallucinogenic bells, tempting me into the darkness again. The velvety purple leaves of the heuchera are scarred with yesterday's weather and smeared with slime from an insomniac snail with the munchies. It's still raining and grey outside.

The water feature in my garden is modelled on the reflective pool in the Alhambra. It is somewhat smaller, measuring about 10ft by 4ft, slightly messier and surrounded by wood found in a demolished church. The water doesn't reflect, it murks. It is relaxing to look out on it when the moon is bright and the diamonds of light ripple off the surface like a million stars twinkling with conversation. Sadly, this hasn't actually happened yet as the murk seems to absorb the rays and swallow them up like a ravenous black hole.

I am blessed by visits from a rather smart fox which sometimes tries, and fails, to look at its reflection in the murk. Urban foxes are usually scruffy and rather furtive looking, but this one has a fine chocolate coat and a cool, slightly arrogant saunter, commuting to the city, safe in the knowledge that the nearest hunt is meant to be 100 miles away.

However, there are other horses in this area, the police mounted division patrol the streets on football days and leave great steaming horticultural gifts for me to sweep up and put into the compost heap. A large laundry bag serves the purpose well, and as the crowd for the football gathers, talking about the latest signings and singing songs about the scum ( the yids who, like me, support Spurs), a rather strange figure is seen stooping over with a dustpan and brush, looking like a Dickensian Jewish question mark. As any gardener knows, good compost is like chicken soup, a cure-all, and horse manure is the dog's bollocks (or matzo balls). A note of caution: never - and that means never - spread fresh manure straight onto the bed as this burns the roots.

One of the beneficiaries of this earthy concoction is a delicate white-flowered fuchsia that waves in the breeze as if saying goodbye to an illusion of First in Show at Chelsea. Ending up in the shade of a large tree, at the back of a small flat, by a busy road, close to a football ground, near both Holloway and Pentonville prisons has been a tough call. Even the yearly top-dressing of "specially selected, hand-picked manure-fed compost" can't make up for this abuse.

I am a victim too. I have just completed a small display at the Chelsea Flower Show of plants in junk. Ferns in rusty tomato tins, old wine boxes, an empty can of chicken manure, and an assortment of old tat out of skips and dustbins. When I came back to collect my 'installation', not a single thing was left. Every piece had been stolen. Things that, had they not been part of the display, would have merited a letter of complaint to the council about the disgusting stuff that was being dumped in the area by the son of the son of an asylum-seeker. Duchamp was right.

Somewhere in the world are three rusted tins, an empty bucket of chicken shit and a cardboard box that belonged to me. I was tempted to go round and steal someone else’s display, but being far too mature and British for that, I just swore at some foreigners, tried to run over a cyclist and dug another hole in the garden.

Also by Adam Caplin:
Weasels ripped my flesh
Death and the land mollusc
Fertilising the inner garden