They can start in the deep of January when the monochrome of winter makes you ache for colour. Perhaps for some they start when you shake the cold from the first seed catalogue you’ve carried in from the mailbox. Or the dreams start with a book bag burgeoning with inspiration, toted home from the library.

However it starts, it weaves visions of colour, perfection, order. What a wonderful way to spend a winter afternoon, leafing through the coloured pages, sipping a cup of hot, while outside the cold wind blows towards February. These reveries defy failure.

This is a gardeners dreamtime. The tangles of weeds, blighted flowers, rodent chewed vegetables of the past summer are puny ghosts. They do not haunt this dream. In this dreamtime the acronite, snowdrops, and crocus shoot exultantly through the melting snow. Early tulips wave happily, beckoning an urgent spring.

Garden rows are straight and the plants are well trained, know their places. Wax beans glow butter yellow, lettuce is deep and crisp, snap peas are small bursts of sweet, eaten before they meet the pot. The curling blossom shoots of the garlic are picked, just right, and savoured in fresh pesto. Carrots pull clean and bright from the earth.

Tomatoes grow explosive red, fall into a basket with a warm plumpness. Along the fence line grows a rusty hedge of marigold. The petunias in planters are scarlet cascades. Each rose is a prize winner. All is peace and perfection. No weeds, no drought, no pestiferous pests.

This is a gardener’s dreamtime, a perfect time, wrapped safe in winter’s drowsy sleep.