The land lies at Skrīveri, in the middle of Latvia, on the right bank of the Daugava about seventy-five kilometres upstream of Riga. It is quiet, level country: river valley, oak groves, pine on the sandy rises, and farmland that has been worked for a very long time without ever becoming industrial.

Skrīveri is known in Latvia for two things — a dendrological park laid out around a nineteenth-century manor, still one of the richest collections of trees in the country, and a milk fudge that most Latvians ate as children. Both tell you roughly what kind of place it is: green, unhurried, and slightly sweeter than it needs to be.

Two hectares of it are ours, and the rest is the reason they are worth having.

The plot is an irregular quadrilateral, roughly 145 by 140 metres, rising some three metres from the south-eastern corner to the northern boundary. That fall is the single fact that determined everything else: water collects at the bottom, so the pond went there, and the house went to the high, dry, western side where the approach already existed.

Before us the land was pasture and then, for about fifteen years, nothing at all. What grows here now is what arrived on its own — a good indication of what will survive being planted deliberately.

Two hectares is small enough to walk in seven minutes and large enough to lose someone in.

Three test pits were dug in the first spring, one in each intended planting zone. All three found the same profile: a thin, dark topsoil over sandy loam, over glacial till at about a metre. Drainage is free everywhere except the south-eastern corner, where the till comes closer to the surface and water stands after rain.

The soil is mildly acidic, which suits the planting list and rules out anything that wants chalk.

One storey, board-marked concrete, a flat roof.

The plan is a regular octagon with eight-metre sides.

The reasoning is simple. An octagon has no back.

The courtyard is also a climate.

The house does not stand in the landscape. It cuts a piece out of it and keeps it.

The garden takes the eastern half of the site.

The planting is dense and layered.

Everything chosen already grows in Latvia of its own accord.

The only thing trimmed here is the path.

The only place on the property with straight lines.

The beds are forty centimetres high, because one only has one back.

What grows here is whatever is worth carrying from round the corner.

The kitchen garden sits beside the kitchen, not at the far end of the land.

The pond sits in the south-eastern corner, at the lowest point of the site.

The water is live and untreated.

In winter it freezes and becomes one more reason to leave the house.

The only thing on this land that produces nothing.

The place is named after them, so they get a paragraph of their own. A pair of Corvus corax holds the tall spruce at the north-western corner and has done since before we arrived. They are the first thing you hear from the road and the reason the name was never up for discussion.

They are not tame and will not become tame. In four years they have permitted us to walk the northern path without comment, which for a raven counts as friendship.

The land lies on a field road with no name and no number. Coordinates will be given when you are invited; there is no point publishing them, because there is nothing here to visit unannounced.

The last four hundred metres are gravel and, in March and November, are gravel with opinions. Anything with normal ground clearance manages it; anything low does not.