At last, it's ours. Roots sink deep with the marital home.

At 10:30 yesterday, we got the call.  Monies had transferred, legal papers were all official.  Without leaving our desks, we had become homeowners.

It wasn't so much joy as contentment that washed over me.

I am a nest builder.  This was obvious even as a young woman when, forced by sorority house tradition to move rooms every quarter, I'd need to make sure my new room was completely decorated before move day ended.  Moving in with my boyfriend was one of the happiest, and most monumental, decisions of my life.  In the two years that have followed I've revelled in a wonderful relationship.  But I have hated living in temporary, rented accommodation.  Unable to put things on the wall, no point in decorating, no sense cultivating the garden.  A whole home life lived in temporary expectation, like a plant confined, root bound, to a pot, when it really should be in the ground.

And now, home.  Not just any home.  The marital home.  Chosen carefully, with every expectation of establishing ourselves there until the downsizing of our advanced years.  A home big enough to fit all our stuff.  A blank canvas with magnificent decorative possibilities.  A walled garden with enough room to challenge me, but not so much space as to make me a slave to horticulture.

Unexpectedly, a modern home.  For all my determination to end up in a picturesque village property, reality won out.  I've learned my lesson from the constant worries and maintenance of the 200-year-old cottage I lived in when I met Piers.  I've had enough of old world charm, and am rushing headlong towards the delights of high-tech insulation, windows that tip in for cleaning and every room pre-wired for television and ethernet.

In the value-for-money stakes, there was no contest.  We're getting more square footage, for less money, than any comparable property we viewed.  The floor plan is beautifully designed, with lovely touches like glass in the doors between rooms, to allow you to contain the heat while letting light flow through, or the granite kitchen counters with the power strip that pops out of a hidden hatch on the island.  It spreads over three stories; one of the spare bedrooms provides a roomy "man cave" for Piers. And for me, an office over the garage, so home working becomes a bit more formal and it's easier to separate the job from life.

The garden is surrounded by high brick walls in the same pale yellow as the house.  Just a swathe of grass now, I'll spend all winter sketching plans for what it might become.  Around the patio and the front of the house are beds ready for planting.  And plant, I have already done.

Pot bound roots isn't just an analogy for me.  I have a platoon of pots I've carried with me from Thames Cottage, nursing them in anticipation of a real garden.  In they went this afternoon.  Released from captivity, allowed to sink roots deep.  (If they can get through the thick clay I've discovered forms the basis of my land. I have a lot of soil improvement to do.)  One plant was more important than all the others.  A medium-sized hosta, light green leaves.  An unexceptional plant to look at.  But my own family roots are bound up in it.

My grandfather grew the ancestor of this plant in his garden in Bellerive Acres, a neighbourhood in suburban St. Louis, in the '50s.  When they sold that family home, my mother dug up sprigs of the host to take to their retirement house, and to plant at our place.  For 40 years, that hosta lined the walk to our front door.  When I left the house for the last time, I scattered some of my mother's ashes in her garden, then I dug up a sprig of that hosta, wrapped it carefully, put it in my luggage and brought it back to England.  I've been nursing it in a pot ever since, waiting for today.

And now, spade in hand, I'm digging in my soil, in my garden, planting my ancestral hosta, outside my house, shared with my husband.  At last, I am truly home.