MUSINGS FROM THE BOWER 40

This blog is running late. I seem to have been rather busy what with one thing and another, plus the fact that suddenly sunshine and blue skies came along, and I certainly wasn’t going to miss out on them. The bower is coming into its own now, as the clematis is sending up clusters of pink and purple flowers and the honeysuckle will soon be in bloom. Nearby, a mock orange shrub is a mass of white-tipped buds – I love the heady scent of this plant and am eagerly waiting for the buds to open. What I would really like to get is a ‘New Dawn’ climbing rose – this rose is a very delicate shade of shell pink, and I first made its acquaintance way back in the 1950s when my Dad planted one to grow around the porch of our new house in Welwyn Garden City. We had moved from a flat in Brixton – three rooms, no bathroom, outside lavatory – to, what to us, was paradise. Now we had a garden rather than a yard where hardly anything grew and Dad discovered that he enjoyed gardening,

He also found that he enjoyed constructing things from wood, and soon our garden boasted a rustic trellis, complete with a gate, over which roses such as Paul Scarlet and Golden Showers climbed, In front, he planted bush roses, including Peace, Fragrant Cloud, Super Star, Ena Harkness, Orange Triumph and Iceberg. The creation of the garden was no mean achievement, because when we moved in, the house was new and the garden was just one solid bed of yellow clay. He learnt the names of the plants and shrubs, reading about them in a large gardening encyclopedia which was soon well-thumbed, and he taught the names to me. Out on a walk one day, he found a large branch that had snapped from a beech tree, He pushed it into the ground at the end of the garden, and much to our amazement it grew. As far as I know, the tree is still there, it must be over fifty years old now.

The apple tree that I sometimes mention in my blogs actually came from Mum and Dad’s garden. Dad planted the tree as a sapling in the 1950s, but by the early 1970s had decided that it was in the wrong place and didn’t know what to do. So my husband and I dug it up – it was quite large, but somehow we managed to transport it to our new home, and it has grown into a magnificent tree beloved by the birds and squirrels, with a beautiful crop of blossom in the spring and, most years, a large crop of eating apples. Dad planted fruit bushes – his favourites were raspberries and gooseberries, and I remember hot sunny days (it was always hot in summer when I was young, or so it seemed!), picking the gooseberries so that Mum could make pies or jam, and my hands and arms being scratched by those vicious thorns. I didn’t much mind though, and every so often I would put a gooseberry into my mouth, revelling in that slightly bitter taste that made my tongue tingle after I had crunched through the bristly skin. Dad also grew potatoes, lettuce, tomatoes and beans – he experimented with many vegetables to see which would grow best. We ate healthily in the 1950s, no ready meals or frozen vegetables then. Mum cooked everything from scratch, an on Sundays would produce a full roast dinner with apple pie or jam tart for afters. She always made two so that we had a choice of pudding.

Of course, I had my own little plot, and especially loved pansies. One year I bought some from the greengrocer – he fobbed me off with some shrivelled plants, thinking that it wouldn’t matter as I was just a small girl. He soon found that it did matter when Mum marched back to the shop with the pansies and demanded he replace them with good plants. She didn’t want my interest in gardening to disappear if I became disappointed that my pansies wouldn’t flower! I sowed seeds too – Virginia stock, night scented stock, cornflowers and love-in-a-mist. There were nasturtiums as well, although they always ended up thick with blackfly. These are old-fashioned flowers, rather like the golden rod and tall Michaelmas daisies that Dad planted along our boundary fence, and the peppery smelling lupins, clove-scented stocks and tall hollyhocks with their delicate, almost translucent flowers that he grew in the flowerbeds. He adored French marigolds, especially the clear lemon-yellow variety which he swore kept the whitefly away, and he planted white honey-smelling alyssum and light blue lobelia around the edges of the borders. He put Canterbury bells, phlox, antirrhinum, lavender and dahlias in a bed that ran along the edge of the lawn. The one flower that I really disliked was called ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ – one year Dad planted it all along the front garden, and I thought that not only was it ugly with its long, dark red, drooping tassels, but also the name was horrible!

My garden today is much smaller than that of my childhood, just about a quarter of the size, but I do cram a lot into it. Sadly, there is no room for a herbaceous border, and many of the plants and trees are grown in tubs. I always have pansies, alyssum, hollyhocks, lavender and lobelia, and scatter seeds of the ‘old-fashioned’ annuals wherever I can.  I have a variegated hosta in a tub that Dad gave me about twenty years ago – each year the snails and slugs enjoy a feast, but it fights back fresh and green every spring.  And of course, I have his apple tree. When he died, in 2000, Mum bought a red-flowered crab apple tree that she planted in a large pot in her garden. Just two-and-a half years later, she passed away as well. I brought Dad’s potted crab apple tree to my garden, and potted up a white-flowered crab apple in her memory. The two trees stand side by side, giving a beautiful display in spring and an abundant crop of crab apples in autumn. Living memorials for two people who loved flowers and gardens so much.

Red blossom for Dad.......

       

                

....and white for Mum