The Gardening Habit

I came late to gardening, just as I did cooking.

My mother is a gardener as was her own mother before her. Some of my earliest memories are of playing in the ups and downs and hidden corners of Grandma Mewton’s garden in Torquay. It was on a sloped pitch, surrounding the square box 1930s house on three sides. There were neatly clipped lonicera hedges (my grandfather was the one who wielded the shears), fern-fringed ponds in stone walls, steps up, steps down, pathways and plants. It was not a Swallows & Amazons adventurous expanse of wilderness; no, it was neat and tidy and no doubt much smaller than my small mind recalls it as. But it was my grandparents’ garden, far from home, and it was magical to my infant eyes.

As I grew up I never showed any interest in the garden. My mother would labour and I would watch from the wings. Maybe she should have tried to involve me more. No matter; as time goes by you develop and grow, and it is usually not until you have your own patch of earth that the gardening habit starts to dawn. The seeds of interest are sown, they germinate and they take root. With any luck, with the right care and attention, they will actually flourish.

For me those seeds were sown in a garden in west London. The house was a former vicarage – a small detached Victorian home which once lay in apple orchards beside the River Crane. Post war progress had meant the orchards had long disappeared beneath bricks and mortar, but a small L-shaped patch had mercifully remained. This was my garden.

The river ran down one side, meeting the Thames a little further down its course. Overgrown steps ran down to a simple mooring where we kept a little row boat. A mature willow dominated  at one end, its soft tendrils trailing down to the water’s edge, while an aged apple (a Bramley) stood proud at the other. It was not large, but seemed enormous after the tiny square paved yard I had left behind in Acton.

I was lucky enough to inherit a gardener who worked at Osterley, one of the UK’s great historic houses with a magnificent  18^th century garden and parkland. My garden was in good hands! Anthony kept things in order while I tended to my toddlers and babies. He taught me of the dangers of euphorbia sap, the invasive horrors of Japanese Knotweed and other bits and bobs along the way. When I had a moment out from motherhood I would tend the borders, prune a rose, plant a plant. But most of all I just enjoyed it. At every opportunity I would open the doors and windows and simply be outside. The planes would scream overhead all too often, but in moments of tranquillity I revelled in the rising and lowering of the water and the different moods it brought: the small boats and canoes passing by, the heron in the shallows. I made willow bracelets for the girls (a throwback to my own childhood) and gathered up the apples; we picked daffodils in early spring and admired the wonderful wisteria in the summer that coated the back of the house, softening the red bricks and adding timeless beauty. But it was the apple tree that was really at the garden’s heart. We sat on the bench underneath it, we ran around it singing ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush’, I lay picnic rugs in the shade of its canopy on hot summer days, I admired the pink blossoms blowing gently in the breeze from my bedroom window as well as the green parakeets who sat sqwarking on its branches.  When we had to leave the house, just three short years later, it was the tree that I knew I was going to miss and all the memories it embodied. As if in answer to my sadness, a large bough fell off shortly after we had said our goodbyes. Nature speaks volumes if you choose to listen.

And so we headed north to our new home in the hills. I now garden amongst sheep and gritstone. I left the clays of London for the loam of Combs. It was a swap that I was happy to make. I bought my previous house for its garden, and so I did my present one. When it is time to move on again, it is this that I will struggle to leave behind. We viewed the house on a dank November day, but still it spoke to me: the building, yes, undoubtedly; but, most of all, its context. To be able to wake every morning to a garden nestled in such a magnificent landscape is a joy and a privilege. It is this spirit of place which holds me in its grasp and has made a gardener out of me.

This blog is to be a record of this blessing, an exercise in mindfulness, of appreciating the crumbs of joy which are given to us daily by the miracle of Nature.