My Childhood Garden

 I remember my childhood garden quite vividly. I grew up in a post-war council flat on a sizeable plot of land. The flats were arranged in blocks of four, ground floor and first floor. We were upstairs so overlooked our neighbour's garden. Ours lay to the side.

My parents were not gardeners !

In the 1970s gardening as an activity fell into two categories. Those people who grew vegetables or worked allotments and cultivated for the table. These were the people who had 'dug for victory' during the Second World War.

And those middle class people who gardened for pleasure. Neatly striped lawns and manicured flower beds. Rose bushes sprayed to within an inch of their lives. My parents didn't have the time for either as they were too busy working. Looking after the garden was seen as just one more chore so our garden was largely just lawn.

Our front garden was bordered by a laurel hedge behind which stood two enormous (so they seemed to me) apple trees. A mass of frothy white blossom in the Springtime and producers of Bramley cooking apples later in the year. My childhood was rich with stewed fruit, pies and crumbles. But the trees did not remain for long. Apparently they had 'some sort of disease' so men with chain saws arrived and we were left with two ugly sores on the lawn. 

To the far side of the garden were double gates, a rudimentary driveway and the footings of a garage. Long since knocked down. As a toddler there is a photo of me standing next to rose bushes in this area of the garden but by the time I started school, the area had been grassed over. Front and back gardens were divided by laurel bushes, fast growing conifers and a large forsythia bush. By the front door was a privet hedge, home to a hedgehog family, the only flower bed in the entire garden. A place for my dad's wallflowers and my sunflower plants. In later years my parents planted a honeysuckle which flowered profusely.

The back garden was more of the same. Home to my childhood swing, the bird bath, numerous lilac bushes and a stunted apple tree. That was allowed to stay 'for the birds' as the fruits were sour and inedible. It was also home to a very large laurel bush which was my own private domain. Easy to climb, I spent hours camped out in that tree, observing the neighbours.

There was no fixed boundary between us and our downstairs neighbours and I was able to wander at will into their back garden. Apart from an area for drying washing, it was entirely given over to the production of fruit and vegetables. My first introduction to allotment style gardening. There was a large damson tree at the far end of the garden, gooseberry and blackberry bushes. I was involved in the harvesting of all of these...and the subsequent jam making and tasting.

At one end of the garden was a beautiful hydrangea bush. It was a very intense blue, unusual growing on a clay soil but my neighbour showed me the secret. You had to feed the plant iron to keep the blue colour. She would bury rusty nails and horse shoes beneath the plant. My first introduction to hedge-witchery !

My parents didn't really use the garden to 'relax' in. Granted there were a couple of fold up garden chairs and occasionally my mother would suggest 'tea in the garden-picnic style' on a blanket. But my father had an abhorrence of insects, a legacy of his time in the tropics. At the first feel of an ant on his skin or a wasp flying past and he would head back indoors. I'd been stung a few times and was nervous of anything that flew or buzzed so al fresco dining was never a success .The garden was something we viewed from the windows and walked into to take the rubbish out.

Once I'd reached the age of about eight and could reliably tell the time, I didn't play in the garden. I was out with my friends making camps in the local woods or careering around on bikes and roller skates.

Having the patience to appreciate a garden and growing things was something which would come with time.

These photos were taken in 1989.