Garden Trail

One view of my Wye plot.

I have recently seen some of the David Attenborough’s T.V. series on Gardens and it has brought on a little rush of some of my own garden memories, beginning with the very first garden I had on the so-called ‘sidepiece’; the empty strip of green, grassy space adjacent to our long narrow back garden in Nottinghamshire which my mother worked to hard to beautify and where her huge admiration for dahlias really took hold. The appeal of my own first garden did not last, perhaps when it dawned on me that having a garden did not simply signify transient beauty and satisfaction;  it meant hard work on an activity which was never completed!

A wonderful acer in my little garden in Wye, Kent

Cherry Star. A recent newcomer to the word
of dahlias

After watching my mother’s enthusiastic gardening, I did eventually realise that she must have had the proverbial ‘green fingers’ lacked by me. She took the hard work in her stride and adored her garden which brought her immense pleasure to a toilsome life of relatively few pleasures. She could rarely afford to buy plants and in that, she was typical of many working-class women who instinctively took to beautifying their surroundings but with little more than enthusiasm and perhaps the remembered gardens of their parents, usually produced by their fathers who seemed to be keen on growing chrysanthemums and potatoes. My Mum was just not interested in growing salad or vegetables; mystifying considering our poverty and baffling from the current perspective that freshly grown salads and veg are considered ‘a good thing’ for health. What she had, or rather, what our rented semi had, was a very long, quite narrow, stretch of land behind the house, bordered on the left by a small wood, and with a parallel stretch of land on the other side, belonging to the old lady next door whose family seemed to ignore their patch. As a result, the garden next-door was a low-level shambles cowering behind a privet

Cafe au lait collection.
A dahlia armful which would have produced
maternal delight!

 hedge, so no competitive element ever entered the equation. What remained in her mind’s eye was a picture of the remembered girlhood garden produced by her miner father’s passion for gardening. Apparently, in addition to producing his vegetables, he had grown flowers too and his floral garden had been beautiful. I think these memories perhaps unconsciously, had provided a standard for her, for our back garden, and though money was scarce, she could buy, at the right time, reasonably-priced dahlia bulbs from the Co-op grocer, on her weekly order, and somehow, this gave her permission, as it were, to buy dahlia bulbs, and other plants for sale, which might have appeared. I cannot remember if other garden delights were available from the same source, but she had a brisk additional custom of swapping plants and sometimes seeds, with neighbours and friends in what appeared to my childish observation, frequent, almost never-ending botanical traffic which seemed to afford her immense pleasure. I am not now sure where her particular passion for dahlias came from, but they became of real importance to her. Thinking back now, I can see the huge variety available but even more important to my mother,d I suspect, was that many varieties of dahlia were not only large and beautifully colourful; they were showy and arresting to the eye and added a flamboyance to the mosaic of pattern and palate of our back garden which ALWAYS, to her quiet satisfaction, elicited appreciative expressions of delight and approval from visitors and neighbours.  Dahlias had impact! And they were easy to grow while impossible to ignore!  And they continue to wield a similar power with me inasmuch as,when I notice them in a display, I inevitably think of her.

Potted trees in Kent.

My next garden, if that is the right word, was the two acres of ‘grounds’ of a Derbyshire hall which coincided with, or perhaps added to, a period when life seemed to be lived in a state of perpetual, low level frenzy! The thirty years there, initially with Mum’s help when she joined us for around ten years, saw my gardening somehow squeezed into the myriad pile of chores and duties and responsibilities; enjoyed insufficiently it is true, though visually appreciated. I tended the borders diligently, but the grounds of Waingroves Hall in Derbyshire, with very little effort save the perpetual grass-cutting undertaken by a less-than-keen husband, were a long, perpetual delight of shade and light. It was where I occasionaly sought the solace of silence among the trees and where a furtive, anonymous fox regularly checked the pond hoping for a careless duck paddling unawares. 

The garden draping the front door of my sister's house
in Bulmer at least ten years ago.
My sister was a Very Keen and Knowledgeable Gardener
who created two special
new gardens from the wilderness.

A move to Kent, alone, for the next thirty years, was when I fell in love with a small, period house, half of a former hall house, with a tiny garden and a brick courtyard, in an historic village, where, for the first time for me, gardening in pots began. I developed a gradually growing tiny expertise in this special botanical branch which proved useful when I moved to an apartment with a lovely terrace in Florence for around 7/8 years. And so now to Bury St Edmunds with a second-floor flat, a baby terrace off the kitchen and long roof terrace off the small study. Needless to say, both terraces feature pots and hanging baskets which adorn my surroundings but which now combine to challenge my fading energy!!

View of a friend's garden in Bruges which I loved.

A friend in Firenze in a wild garden.

This has been an interesting, if unexpected, memory trip! Having had these Jardin Jingles sounded out briefly above, I realise that following my life’s garden trail in memory does, in fact, trace the outline of the actual 91+ preceding years.