Generation game: how British Bangladeshi gardeners have gone back to their roots

With bottle gourds, naga chillies, fenugreek and amaranth among other plants, Fulnahar Begum’s west London garden is a cornucopia of colour and flavour. All photographs by Sophia Evans/The Observer Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

When my mother, Fulnahar Begum, arrived in England in the 1980s from Bangladesh, she remembers looking out from the plane and wondering where on earth she’d come to. “Everything looked so grey and miserable. It was very different from what we were used to.”

At customs, she was worried when an officer pulled a crumpled brown envelope full of seeds from her suitcase. Her own mother, Abijan Bibi, had told her to scatter them in her new home, saying: “That way a piece of this land will always be with you.”