There are two gardeners beside the shore.

He tends the dunes, plants salt-hardy flowers and heather above the tideline. His gardens are geometric whorls of sea-tossed pebbles, beneath shale-grey cliffs which ring with birdsong.

She paints in flourishes of kelp, effervescent coral in hedgerow-straight rows. She sculpts cartilaginous fishes from sea-sodden wreckwood, displays them on dolerite plinths dredged from the continent’s edge.

All his designs face the tide, for his works are in unspoken conversation.

And all her designs are equal parts imagination, refraction through the ocean-sky boundary, and remembrance of the spring tide, when she last swam the labyrinth of her counterpart’s shell-work.

They may be destined never to meet, but artists appreciate craft. And through the placement of a flowerbed, through a coral archway’s curve, they share communion.