Friendship blossoms…

Nov 11

A love letter to our childhood garden…

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment that gardening became an obsession for my mum. The plants in her life have come and gone over the years, like a series of old, eccentric friends, all with unique personalities and gifts to offer. Some of these friendships flowered fleetingly whilst others have grown steadily in the background, putting down roots which crept into the bones of our home.

The first of these ‘plant friendships’ I remember her having was with an oversized Swiss cheese plant she raised from a cutting. Together my parents and this houseplant made the daunting move across the country from their North London flat to a shabby house in a run down town on the ‘wrong’ side of the Cotswolds. The unruly plant (seen below behind the dog) took a while to adjust to its slower pace of life - as did my parents by all accounts. Upon leaving the excitement of the city in pursuit of space and fresh air, they had found that the fantasy of long walks and pub lunches was in fact harder to achieve than originally planned.

The garden in our new home of consisted of an awkwardly narrow sloping lawn and a weed strewn patio. It required work to make it into the paradise my parents had envisioned and as such was at first neglected. Meanwhile, the house plants gradually settled in and took over inside. Eventually it was decided that my mum’s Swiss cheese plant needed a bigger home, so it was taken to a friends larger conservatory where it still thrives 35 years later. A recent visit to this old friend saw us bringing home a cutting which is now once again taking over the hallway.

Mum’s first foray into her new countryside garden involved the introduction of a gaggle of scrawny tomato plants, which lived proudly on the patio every summer. These plants always grew too tall for their pots and would fall over at the slightest breeze. Bamboo canes were tied in and fastened to drainpipes or the patio fence. The harvest was modest but the tiny red fruits of my mum’s labour were blended into all manner of baby foods and soups designed to feed my sister and me.

Bottles of tomorite feed and giant bags of compost were stacked haphazardly in our front porch next to wellington boots and a tangled mess of garden hose. Come autumn, the bedraggled tomato plants would be marched into the porch; the smell of dry soil and musty tomato filling our noses each time we entered the house.

It was probably around my 8th birthday that she went into quite an obsessive hanging basket phase. We would visit the local garden centre and she would pick out twirling metal baskets, crass and kitsch in equal measure. Petunias, geraniums and lobelia flowers were stuffed together in varying combinations of garish colour and became my mum’s new best friends in the garden. She would hang the baskets anywhere: from drainpipes to washing lines. When there was nowhere left to hang them they would simply be balanced on walls or patio furniture, the mossy undersides staining wooden tables and benches green.

It was a few years later that the hosta arrived on the scene. This gentle giant caused quite a stir over the years because with it came a gardener’s enemy: slugs. I wont go into the details but I was a 10 year old with access to salt and hordes of slugs. The hosta and its fern friends lived on the patio with various levels of slug damage for 20 years before my parents moved house. The patio in their new home is mysteriously slug free; to my mum’s joy.

The geraniums are one of her most uncomplicated and reliable relationships. Mum stuck by them through the years as they came in and out of fashion and our patio has never been without at least one pot. She likes to keep them in groups to make sure they are never lonely. In the past I have thought they made the garden seem a little fussy but in recent years they have made a bit of a come back and now feel suitably stylish in a somewhat gaudy way.

There was a phase where she attempted to make friends with a group of unruly roses. The savvy climbers grew in record time up a wall in the back garden but consisted mainly of thorny stems and not much else. The occasional rose that did eventually flower was pale peach in colour. She always picked them immediately to be showcased on the kitchen windowsill; a sweet smelling trophy to justify all the hardship and pruning that was going on behind the scenes. The roses grew to an impressive height over the years, the stems becoming as thick as small trees. Many nasty cuts and scratches were endured by my sister and I, who often used them as a macabre climbing frame. I have a distinct memory of picking at at the rose stems in order to make them easier for climbing: the sharp woody thorns getting stuck under my soil-stained fingernails.

The whole family developed a long standing friendship with a Christmas tree some time in the 90s. You can see it in the photograph below which she took of me (left) my sister (right) and the tree (in the middle, pride of place). I have memories of helping my Dad haul in the soggy thing each year, its brown needles coating the carpet after just three hours inside, whilst our dog sniffed at the lower branches suspiciously. We would stack it onto various tables and boxes to make it taller, hang chocolates and home made decorations from it and marvel at how well it had come on each year. I cant quite remember the time it was decided that we needed a bigger tree but in hindsight I feel a twinge of sadness that we didn’t plant it outside.

After getting some sense of order in the back garden my parents began a longstanding a battle with a less than friendly plant: Japanese knotweed. Many know it as a homeowner’s worst nightmare, yet here we were with this poisonous and intrusive plant growing pride of place on the slopped bank next to the driveway. I have memories of cutting pathways through its bamboo like stems to create enclosed hideaways. We pretended we were in a tropical rainforest hiding from tigers and all the worst kinds of jungle predator. That the growth of this attractive plant was actually a criminal offence was eventually pointed out by a concerned friend.

In a pre-Google time, things like this were harder to identify and, embarrassed at her lack of gardening savvy, my mum called in the professionals who immediately came to cut it all down the following week. My sister and I were devastated by the loss of our jungle. It was only when I found it in the garden of my London flat years later that I fully grasped how truly wild it had been that we had so much of it in the garden when growing up.

The bamboo obsession started around the millennium. A book on futuristic garden design had been bought at the charity shop. Wanting to take the front garden in a more contemporary direction my parents planted a row of it on their drive. They were unaware of the sheer strength and growing ability of this plant. The roots grew so rapidly that it pushed through the fence and under the adjacent road resulting in various trials with the neighbours (and the tarmac). This mishap didn’t put my mum off her stylish new friend though. She moved it into big pots where it could be more easily contained and provide privacy from aforementioned neighbours.

After 28 years my parents finally moved across the valley to a spot on the hill from where they would finally get to see the sunset. Upon hearing about this new spacious garden, the old friends of plants past came knocking. Hanging baskets rose from the dead, appearing like purple and pink ghosts swinging from every other drainpipe. The 90s were back and with them came the roses which are now pruned neatly and behaving much more like well-mannered friends. The geraniums multiplied on the new patio; an army of red sitting next to the old hosta, which is thriving since its escape from the slugs and has almost tripled in size. The tomato plants have grown out of their scrawny teenage bodies and now live in a cosy greenhouse alongside a whole host of exciting new friends: aubergines, cucumbers and peppers, as well as an excruciatingly cool crowd of hot chillis and some unbelievably sweet melons. Outside the greenhouse is a vegetable circus of performers. The current stars of the show are the pink fir apple potatoes, with candy stripped beetroot and wonky carrots offering important supporting roles. Mum documents her vegetable friends on instagram @carolswonkyveg and her foray into social media provides a joyful (and comical) break in our mundane newsfeeds.

The garden has become the centre of life and what they have achieved in the 4 years since arriving here is quite frankly astounding. There are winding pathways and patchworks of grasses (inspired by the Oudolf gardens at Hauser and Wirth). Mum has also made lots of new friends; wisteria and clematis bloom with increasing enthusiasm each year, climbing over wooden trellises and up the side of the house. There are wild flowers: cow parsley and poppies dancing in the breeze. Paths are mowed carefully through the long wild grass at the end of the garden which eventually turns into a field with views so perfect it makes your heart stop.

I am at the start of my own plant relationships in many ways - my tiny balcony is home to a couple of silly hanging baskets, an obnoxious clematis, some unruly nasturtiums and a very passive fern plant. Over the last few years we have been getting to know each other. My parents dedication to the garden illustrates that often relationships take time to flourish and you have to be patient. Some of the best friendships do not make sense until much later and then out of nowhere they bloom into something you can’t live without.