My answer to the allotment GARDENING

Behind every garden there is said to lie a vision. It may be a hazy memory from childhood, a photograph in a pretty book or a memory enhanced by love on holiday in the south of France.

Sometimes I meet male corporate bulldozers who pat me on the back for continuing to write this column and tell me how much they enjoy gardening. They then settle down in their offices to savage anything that moves slowly. I cannot help wondering about the vision behind their gardens - a secretary, perhaps, on a meaningful picnic for two in very long grass in July?

Vegetable gardens rest on visions too, visions of rich greenery and carrots which grow straight. These visions are a fantasy if you live on a clay soil, in the centre of cities or anywhere within a three-mile radius of my own garden's replica of the shingle on Dungeness Beach. If you do, my advice is quite different. Forget the soil at ground level. Put vegetables out of reach of it and think Tarmac. On it, arrange vegetables in pots, where you can control everything that happens to them. The aim here is to be extremely modern, subverting and deconstructing green gardeners' rules of the game. You can never complain again that I write only for people with big country gardens, whose clocks have stopped in 1962. Here is how to design a vegetable garden on a new wave of modern realism.

First, concrete over the patch you wish to consecrate to vegetables. Then, draw four symbolic figures, one for each corner of your patch of fertility. In the upper right-hand corner, paint a pair of black-gloved hands seizing a supermarket basket in which the FT is showing the share price ofJ. Sainsbury plc. In the lower left, draw a badger, snarling, as one of them snarled at me on Good Friday when I brought it a saucer of inorganic milk. In the lower right, draw some distressed butterflies and a slug weeping with slime as it deconstructs. In the upper left, draw a frustrated rabbit, one with its paws and jaw tied in a bed of young lettuces.

The beauty of this design is that you can use it anywhere, even in small urban gardens, and you can vary the images to include your own worst enemies. When you have laid your concrete zone, place four very large cheap clay pots on its outer edges and fill them with the most exquisite ready-made, fertile compost. Coat their lower rims with Vaseline, which is an excellent defence against climbing slugs; you might consider a line of razor blades against any squirrels with ambition. Into each of the tubs, plant a very special variety of potato, and sow seeds of the excellent medal-winning Sytan variety of carrots, which has won merited awards from the Royal Horticultural Society. It has an excellent taste and is reasonably resistant to the dreaded carrot fly.

My latest volume of hot air on the subject is Organic Gardening by John Fedor, who gardens in northeast America. He claims that "mixing parsley and carrots deters carrot flies because of the masking aroma of the parsley". Dream on, old boy. The flies still eat my carrots and Peter Rabbit polishes off the parsley, just as Beatrix Potter predicted.