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The visit that I made to the British Army camp at Bad Fallingbostel in spring of 2014, was taken to speak to British soldiers who'd very recently returned from fighting in Afghanistan. They were almost the last British soldiers out of Afghanistan, and the plan was to make a radio programme, using my conversations with them as the basis for poems, which is indeed what's happened. I also talked to one or two people associated with the soldiers back here in Blighty, including the mother, Margaret Evison, of Mark Evison, who was killed out there in Afghanistan - actually who, more strictly speaking, was shot out there in Afghanistan and his body was brought back to England while he was still alive just about, the idea being that he might be patched up and allowed to live. But that didn't work; he died. So this is an elegy for Captain Mark Evison based on my conversation with his mother. I think it should pretty well explain itself, except perhaps I can mention just a couple of things: one is that she happened to say in the middle of her conversation with me, very long conversation, that she'd watched the telly at some point during her grieving and had watched a programme about reindeer in the wilderness, and she also told me that after the death of her son she'd gone for the first time to Afghanistan to see the landscape in which he'd briefly fought and in which he had been wounded. When I listened to the transcript of our conversation and when listening to the tapes again, I was very struck by how much of our conversation had, unbeknownst to us, revolved around thoughts to do with landscape and gardens: Margaret Evison is a keen and good gardener. And this poem is called 'The Gardener'.