A letter from a reader

At 62, I keep the flowers going when the garden has finished

I have never written to a shop before, and I did not expect my first letter to be about a cardigan.

Here is the truth of it. Last weekend I cut the garden back. The dahlias went over, the hanging baskets came down, and I swept the last of it into the green bin. I do it every year and every year the same thing happens: I come in, wash my hands, look out of the kitchen window at bare brown beds, and feel the shutters come down for the winter. Five months of grey before there is anything to look at again.

It is not the cold I mind. It is that from October there is nothing with any colour in it, inside the house or out.

So I did what I always do. Put the navy cardigan back on, put the kettle on, and got on with it.

Then I saw it on a friend at the garden centre

My friend Pauline met me for a coffee, of all places at the garden centre, where there is nothing much to buy in October. She had on a soft red cardigan covered in painted lilies and daisies and little blue flowers, over a plain white shirt with the collar out. I said she looked like summer, and she said that was rather the point. She told me it was the Adelle, from Nottingham Boutique, a little boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. I ordered mine that evening.

What happened at the garden centre

I wore it the following Saturday over my white shirt and jeans. Three different women asked me where it was from, and my friend Sue told me I looked like I had made an effort, which I have decided to take as a compliment. One of them said her garden had gone over too, which is how we all talk at this time of year.

The odd thing is how much difference it makes at the sink. I stand there doing the washing up, looking at bare beds, and there are lilies on my own arm. It is a small thing and it works.

Three things I have learned since

One. The red does as much as the flowers. It is a warm red rather than a bright one, so the whole thing reads as cheerful rather than loud. It sits happily with navy, denim and grey.

Two. It wears two ways. Buttoned up it is a jumper, with a shirt collar showing at the neck. Open over the same white shirt it is a light layer. I do both, depending on how cold the kitchen is.

Three. The plain shirt is what makes it work. Something simple underneath lets the print do its job. A white shirt, a plain tee, whatever you already have.

About the price

When I saw the price I was suspicious. Something with a print like this, I assumed, would either cost a small fortune or arrive looking like a photograph stuck on a jumper.

The Adelle is £32.95. It was £66.

There is no catch. They have their autumn sale on, delivery is free, and it arrived looking exactly as it did in the pictures.

I did go and read the reviews before I ordered a second one. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some sites, which if I am honest made me trust it more. One woman had written, "I bought it the week I emptied my hanging baskets. It has cheered me up every morning since." That was the one that decided it for me.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you came round and we sat out on the porch with a cup of tea, this is what I would tell you.

The garden will come back in February and you will be glad of it. In the meantime you are allowed to keep a few flowers about you. Put them on, do the washing up in them, and let the beds look after themselves.

It does not look like it was made for somebody half my age, and it does not look like I have given up either.

Caroline