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In the last three years of his life, I gave up my work teaching movement and dance classes to become his full-time carer. I am not a natural nurse; I am too self-absorbed and distracted. My reserves of compassion are finite. It was only love and loyalty towards Tim and our daughter, Molly, only two when her father became ill, that kept me in for the long haul.

By July 2003 I was at a very low ebb. Tim was too ill to travel. I resigned myself to a summer confined to base, since a holiday was out of the question. One day, I saw a notice in our local healthfood shop, "Oakwood Allotments - Plots Available", and rang immediately. The next day, Tim, Molly and I, plus dog, went to view our prospective plot. It was a small field, full of coarse grass and bindweed, with a little pond at the top end, and a dilapidated shed and rusty water butt. I fell in love instantly, and signed up for a year, paying £20 rent.

This was madness, of course. Years of caring for Tim had eaten at my energy and strength. I also had an old dance injury in my lower back, which had returned to haunt me. How on earth would I find the time and resilience to dig over a neglected piece of land two miles from home? The truth was, I wouldn't - not yet, anyway. In the meantime, it became a potent talisman, a little piece of wild beauty, a promise of plenty to come.

I already knew something about the power of planting. When Tim was diagnosed with cancer in 1994, I had an instant, atavistic desire to make something grow. We were living on a treeless street in south London, in a third-floor council flat with no garden, but that didn't stop me. In the July, in the middle of a scorching summer, Tim was admitted to Royal Brompton hospital for a five-hour operation to excise as much of the tumour as possible from his chest. While he fought to survive on the operating table, I planted pots of sunflowers with Molly and placed them outside our building, on the square of concrete that constituted a front yard. Within days they disappeared (it was that kind of street), but it hardly mattered. The desire to garden had been lit.

Tim came through his operation that day, thanks to both the surgeon's skill and Tim's will to live - although I like to think the sunflowers played some symbolic part in the process, too. Despite those disappearing pots, I persevered, planting window boxes of busy lizzies and blowsy petunias on the two narrow sills outside our bedroom and living room windows. Sometimes I would kneel on the floor of the flat and peer through the foliage, pretending to be out in the open. Weirdly, it seemed to work, if only for a few minutes at a time.

Soon the tenants next door followed suit, filling their window ledges with brassy red pelargoniums, while across the road a more seasoned plantswoman packed her containers with a whole hedgerow of wild flowers and foliage. I remember these flashes of brightness; it helps me, even now, to overcome the darkness of that year. Strange, too, how a conversation started between neighbours whom I never spoke to otherwise, a contagious language of flowers.

Two years later we moved to Leeds. I was 40, and at last I had a real garden. The house we rented had a tiny plot of land at the front, and a shared space at the back. Two months after we moved in, routine scans showed that Tim's cancer was recurring. When it all became too much, there was only one place to be - outside. I had lived in central London all my adult life. I had no idea that the air could smell so sweet, that the earth had such a rich fragrance, that such pleasure could be found in planting something and simply watching it grow.

The garden was a blank canvas when we arrived, just a few wallflowers in narrow borders around a patch of grass. I could fill it with anything I wanted, and did. Gradually, the tiny shrubs I had bought so haphazardly, always on the cheap, began to grow and flourish. From the start, I broke all the rules. Small garden, small plants? I have monsters in my borders: bracing rosemary and spiky purple berberis; palm-leaved rheum and towering plume poppy; copper-leaved cotinus; bamboo and billowing butterfly bush. Also, two apple trees, a sumach, a little weeping pear tree; an arch and a pergola covered with the scrambling excesses of ivy, Clematis montana, honeysuckle and red jasmine, which the bees adore. Everything jostles for space, creating a shade-filled, secret jungle, no more than 20 yards by 10. Whenever the walls of the house close in on me, this garden has offered fragrance and freshness of spirit. It has set me free.

And so the seasons came and went. Seven years passed. As the trees and shrubs grew stronger, Tim became progressively weaker. By 2003, he was in the final phase of his life. Still he lived and breathed, against the odds. Still I gardened - with no plan, no expertise, just an intuitive and increasingly passionate need for the shape, movement, colour, texture and smell of foliage and flowers.

In the last months of his life, Tim became still and quiet. He could no longer walk the dog, but would sit in the garden and read, consuming books as avidly as I pruned. I was glad to have made somewhere beautiful for him to be.

In September 2003, a few weeks after I took on my new allotment, Tim was admitted to the local hospice, where he stayed until his death in January 2004. Each of the three stages in his long illness - from diagnosis, to recurrence, to the final act - have marked a development in my connection with the earth, from window-ledge planting, to tiny garden, to wild and ragged allotment. The terrain has become increasingly large and uncontained along the way, but I have learned to make my peace with things I cannot control.

It has taken two years to get the allotment into any kind of shape. The digging is hard and the soil heavy; the weeds grow with astonishing speed and tenacity. For the first year, I did practically nothing, overwhelmed by grief. But slowly my strength returned, and with it the desire to plant. I began to dig in earnest. To my surprise, my back stayed strong. I planted potatoes and broad beans and cabbages and broccoli, a few peas and beans, together with plenty of gaudy stablemates - marigold, nasturtium and the symbolic sunflower.

My allotment is not well-groomed (the bindweed and marauding pigeons see to that), not artful or subtle - quite the opposite. It is scruffy and disobedient. It is not even very productive. But it is heaven to me. I've found that there is something deeply liberating simply in being outside. The garden's smells and colours are purer and more sustaining than anything man-made. I have an oriental poppy in the front garden whose silk, scarlet hue, set off by the intense black stamen at its centre, shocks me with its brilliance every year. When it is gone, by the middle of June, the memory of it feeds me through the rest of the year, and I long for its return next spring. The pungent oils of rosemary, rubbed between thumb and finger, and the subtle, rich tones of the small white lavender in my herb patch at the allotment fortify and soothe me. None of these plants is rare. I garden thrift shop-style, but the payback is immeasurable.

Everything starts and finishes with the ground. Tim's ashes now lie, wind-blown and free, on his beloved North Yorkshire moors above Whitby and on the bony cliffs of the west coast of Ireland. But there is always renewal, too, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the world of plants, where forgotten bulbs and self-seeded annuals come rearing up every spring. My favourite thing about the daffodil is not its flower, but the stem whose point pierces the surface of the soil so fiercely every March, however cold and unwelcoming the weather. That is real determination.

When I kneel, with handfuls of compost or manure, making the ground ready for something new, making a mess of myself in the process, I am not just planting a flower or shrub. Somehow I am planting myself in there, too. I can see the darkness of the earth, with its complex root systems, its colonies of slow, helpful worms. It also smells wonderful, like the richest chocolate, the most aromatic coffee, the fruitiest rioja.

I have noticed my physical stamina returning through my haphazard attempts to tame these two modest plots of land. Even more importantly, the work provides a break for the brain. Confronted by the horrors of state benefits, child tax credit forms, and the problems of re-entering the professional marketplace, I have taken refuge in the nonjudgmental, non-verbal world of cabbages and herbaceous borders.

The best part of gardening is the breaks between activity. When I can wield spade, wheelbarrow or trowel no longer, my favourite places to sit are two doorsteps - outside my back door at home, and the rickety wooden entrance to my allotment shed. I can sit here for ages, gazing, dreaming. Somehow, everything is more striking at ground level. The shape and colour of the planting around my pond - the tall purple foxgloves and verbenas, the canary-yellow iris - becomes vivid and abundant (seen at a distance, it looks like nothing).

It is not just myself I discover when I garden. All the people I have lost seem to stand beside me. As the film- and garden-maker Derek Jarman put it in Modern Nature, his book about his garden at Dungeness, "I walk in this garden, holding the hands of dead friends." Almost without realising it, I have been planting in memoriam for as long as I have had a garden. In my front garden, the rosemary bush and sumach tree were planted for two dear friends who died of Aids-related illnesses. On the allotment, a space next to the shed is being carved out for Tim, and two young trees have been planted in his honour.

In January this year, my mother, Kathleen, became seriously ill following a hip operation; she died in March. She was a wonderful, instinctive gardener, and particularly loved planting bulbs (a job I hate). When I first moved to Leeds, she gave me some money to buy a plant. I chose Cotinus "Grace", which now faces me when I open the front door. It is indeed a graceful specimen, with leaves of copper shot through with tones of green, which dance and rustle in the slightest breeze. Small when I bought it - about 12in high - it is now the tallest, healthiest plant in the garden, standing at nearly 12ft, which seems a fitting tribute to my mother.

A while ago, on a warm summer's evening, I snuck away to my allotment to water some seedlings. As I walked along the top path, I came upon two men, sitting back in their deckchairs behind the rows of rickety sheds and makeshift greenhouses, cracking open cans of Stella. There was no sign that they planned to do anything more strenuous than lift hand to mouth: they were simply loafing. They looked a little furtive as I bustled past, watering can in hand. I think they expected disapproval, but they needn't have worried. "How civilised," I said, and they grinned back - one of them spectacularly toothless - and carried on drinking. On the way home, I stopped at the off-licence, and later sat on my own back doorstep with my own cold can of beer. The only thing you ever really need do in a garden is enjoy it. Let the garden hold you, and it will.