Thanks. I've also really enjoyed reading all the responses on the forum and on the blog - such warm memories of inspirational friends and family, plants and gardens which led people to a love of gardening. I also loved I Spy books and feel passionately that we need more books for kids on nature - plants and animals as childhood becomes more divorced from the natural world. We need kids to care about nature and its/our future josusa47 says:
My primary school encouraged us. Once, we were each given a Daffodil bulb to take home , I think they may also have supplied pots and bulb fibre, and when they flowered we took them back to school. Mine was one of the best (thanks, Dad) and I received a lovely certificate. Another year, it was candytuft and nasturtium seeds.
I-Spy books were another inspiration. I learned to identify trees, wild flowers, birds, insects, dog breeds .... My dad and several of his workmates collected Brooke Bond tea cards, swapping their duplicates at the office. Many of those were also about the natural world, and I still have some of the albums.
I've really enjoyed reading all these nostalgic and heartwarming stories! Thank you Dogwooddays for starting the thread. This one, as they say, will run and run!
Thanks Lifibeagles - the garden sounds immensely exciting! How lovely that you had a childhood which built your knowledge and confidence about plants and nature. We need to ensure that all children get access to this kind of experience...
Thank you all so much for your responses. I'm reading through them and will respond to each but it's taking me a little time as I've also had hundreds of responses on Facebook and my blog. I've been overwhelmed by the generous way gardeners have shared their experiences.
What a privilege it is to read about how much gardening and nature have given to people in so many different ways. Thank you
A little daunting if I'm honest. I have a rough overall plan but am breaking it down into bite-sized chunks to try not to get over-whelmed by the task. At the moment about 3/4 acre is 8ft weeds that has never been cultivated. But I have never gardened in this soil-type before so it's fun learning what might work and what won't and what will survive the pheasants, stoats and deer and making sure I don't damage the environment that allows the hundreds of butterflies to thrive.
Hi Lifibeagles - I'm retraining and working in garden design, and the most important thing we always chat to garden owners about is having an overall plan even if you aren't going to do it all at once. So I'd say you're going about it the right way. I love that your garden is full of butterflies - wonderful!
Gardens, flowers and wildlife is so good for our health in so many ways - and it's great that this fact is gradually being accepted by more professional bodies and taken on by the media. Enjoy the bees in your garden oooft says:
My mum had a lovely garden when we were wee but i don't think i really appreciated it's beauty and all the work she did. I loved playing in it. Apparantly i always loved bees and spiders too.
There is a national trust place on the southside of Glasgow called greenbank gardens which has the best bee garden. You have to round a corner to get in there and as soon as you do: buzz buzz buzz. So loud. It is heavenly. That garden was my inspiration to begin gardening.
At my last place i tried gardening but can't say it was anything but a chore. That garden was awful. My life was pretty awful too so i eventually sold up and moved to start a new one. The garden here was a bit neglected but truly wonderful underneath it all. What began as a bit of a tidy up quickly became an obsession. Gardening is so good for the mind and soul. I love the way you forget your worries. Id gotten into the habit of being tense and anxious all the time but since i found gardening my mental health is brilliant. I hadn't even realised i had problems until they started going away.
I planted flowers that bees love and on one glorious day a few weeks ago i had a garden that was buzzing like Greenbank. I am hooked!
What a lovely reponse Willbara - thank you. Your story made me smile and feel so grateful to all those people who have passed their love of gardening and nature on to us. I also love being in the allotment with my dad (who first taught me to garden) and my kids (who are now learning themselves). Sharing with family is the best feeling.willbara says:
My love of allotments began nearly eighty years ago in 1938 when as a five year old i first entered the wonderous kingdom of the allotment but it really took off later in the war when with my father i started spending more and more of my time on our plot and was befriended by a German p.o.w who worked on the strawberry field next to the allotment site who showed me with great patience and knowledge nearly everything i needed to know about,not only how to grow things but how to love growing them,he was a wonderful teacher and a wonderful man and, looking back, i found out that he was the real German and Germany and not the thugs that ruled in Germany at the time.
All through my life i have had allotments, where ever i have lived, the one i am now i have had for some thirty years, and although there has been one or two bad moments the good times far out way the bad .
Not only do i garden on my plot i have come to the age when to sit and watch our own small wildlife going about their daily lives is as good as it gets and the phase bird brain applies more to us humans than any bird.
i have had some wonderful moments down on my plot but i think the greatest moment was when my grand daughter brought her son (my great grandson)down to my plot and showed him where she herself had spent so many happy hours with me.
Thanks for sharing that and your video - the garden looks friendly, beautiful and inviting, and obviously gives you both much pleasure. The best kind of garden Doghouse Riley says:
We pretty much picked it all up as we went along, we made a few mistakes but learned from them.
We started with an uncared for garden. A few corporation sized pavingstones for a patio, half scruffy lawn and half over-grown vegetable plot and a dilapidated cedar greenhouse in the far right corner.
So I formulated a long term plan, (I'm good at planning) which evolved over the years. (Some of which I didn't let on to my wife as she wouldn't have had it at the time, as she hadn't the same vision as I). However she bought a lot of the plants, many from Altrincham Market where a local nursery had a stall on Saturdays. They were very good with advice.
We got rid of the veg patch and greenhouse and just had lawn for ten years whilst the three kids were at home, they liked to play badminton on the lawn. We mostly avoided bedding plants and annuals and gave up with hanging baskets.
We did bits at a time, but most was done in the mid-eighties, when our kids were grown up, the two boys had left home and our daughter only home at week-ends, as she was training as a nurse at GOS..
In 1985 I started "major construction," which was completed over two years, mostly in "two week-bites,"of my six weeks of annual holidays.
Everything you see in this video (sorry for the wind noise) I did myself, on my own, as my wife has MS and has never been able to much more than pruning. Although I did have the concrete raft under the patio professionally laid.
In the last thirty years, all I've done is renovated the pergolas I built and we've steadily added to our rhodos and azaleas, some of the latter I've layered. We occasionally add more patio pots for roses etc., "that follow us home " from garden centres and we're occasionally, "moving stuff about."
These form a nice display that my wife can see from her chair in the lounge through the French windows and the vista of the rest of the garden.
It's very low maintenance, just a wizz over with the Flymo, a bit of weeding and pruning, as is our similarly planted small front garden.
I'd rather be playing golf than gardening.
We love these azaleas in our front garden, I've layered over time. They started off as a little "stick" in a four inch pot with a split stem my wife bought from the market for 99p from the stall's reduced to clear box thirty years ago. They're so prolific I prune them with garden shears.
Hi Jacqueline29 - thank you so much for sharing your gardening inspiration and the photos. You are absolutely right about how nature can help us if we let it - and we can help protect it too. Wishing you peace and comfort in your garden with the butterflies.
There's nothing better than starting as a child with a higgledy, piggeldy mess! That's lovely that you feel close to your mum in the garden - gardens can give us so much. Certain plants remind me of different people in my life as do birds and other wildlife. Thanks Pinkmagpie.pinkmagpie says:
I was born in the basement flat of a large Victorian house (with a cellar for the coalman!) and because we were the only ones with access we enjoyed a very large garden. Mum was the gardener of the family and kept the borders neat and colourful. Then one day she tackled the end of the garden which was full of blackberry bushes, overgrown weeds and all sorts. “That” she said “is yours”. My love of gardening began. My way of gardening was to try everything – higgledy piggledy mess, but it was my higgledy, piggledy mess! My parents moved to the Isle of Wight and my mum then commenced on that garden. My mum is no longer with me, she lived for 93 years and had various jobs for me to do each time I visited. I now have a portion of my garden with every flower that mum loved (mainly azaleas, camellias etc… had to be ericaceous plants didn’t it – I had to build a brick built planting area!!) but with it’s little stone saying “mum’s garden”, the various stone frogs I bought her and the fairy solar lamps (yes I know, but they are pretty) whenever it is in bloom I like to think she is sitting there watching me.
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Thanks Lifibeagles - the garden sounds immensely exciting! How lovely that you had a childhood which built your knowledge and confidence about plants and nature. We need to ensure that all children get access to this kind of experience...
Thank you all so much for your responses. I'm reading through them and will respond to each but it's taking me a little time as I've also had hundreds of responses on Facebook and my blog. I've been overwhelmed by the generous way gardeners have shared their experiences.
What a privilege it is to read about how much gardening and nature have given to people in so many different ways. Thank you
A little daunting if I'm honest. I have a rough overall plan but am breaking it down into bite-sized chunks to try not to get over-whelmed by the task. At the moment about 3/4 acre is 8ft weeds that has never been cultivated. But I have never gardened in this soil-type before so it's fun learning what might work and what won't and what will survive the pheasants, stoats and deer and making sure I don't damage the environment that allows the hundreds of butterflies to thrive.
Hi Lifibeagles - I'm retraining and working in garden design, and the most important thing we always chat to garden owners about is having an overall plan even if you aren't going to do it all at once. So I'd say you're going about it the right way. I love that your garden is full of butterflies - wonderful!
Hi Jacqueline29 - thank you so much for sharing your gardening inspiration and the photos. You are absolutely right about how nature can help us if we let it - and we can help protect it too. Wishing you peace and comfort in your garden with the butterflies.