The really important people in this book are not grown-ups but children. What is more, the children give one a curious sense of being rather bigger than the grown-ups; they feel more intensely, they are more brightly coloured, and they have, in fact, more common sense. Which is how it should be.

The heroine is a little girl of ten called Lovejoy – a motherless, or almost motherless, waif.

One day she snatches a packet of cornflower seeds that somebody has dropped on the pavement. She does not particularly want them, but life has taught her to be acquisitive. So she keeps them, and eventually she decides to sow them; and so begins her long search for a garden for some patch of earth in a bombed site or a deserted area.

It was indeed a battle to find her garden and to sow her seeds, and the outcome is uncertain till almost the last page.

But everything comes right for everybody in the end. In this day and age, when in real life nothing seems to come right in the end, I find this book more than faintly refreshing. – Beverley Nichols in the Broadsheet.