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Childhood garden memories....

Julia1983Julia1983 Posts: 139
in The potting shed
Just out of interest, what are everyone's favourite childhood memories of a garden?  I loved sneaking into my grandpa's greenhouse and eating the tomatoes... I still adore the smell and taste of a tomato, especially home grown!  My dream is to one day have a big garden with a proper greenhouse... I also remember with pride the responsibility I felt when given the task of watering my aunt's daisies and my parents new bedding plants... I loved a trip to the seemingly never-ending polytunnels with all the little plants in!  I don't have children myself but the gardens around us are pretty 'sterile', soggy grass and the odd trampoline. I feel those children will miss out. 
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Posts

  • fidgetbonesfidgetbones Posts: 17,618
    Making "scent" by bashing up deep red rose petals in water.
  • PurplerainPurplerain Posts: 1,053
    Eating rhubarb on the kitchen step, with a cup of sugar to dip it in
    SW Scotland
  • josusa47josusa47 Posts: 3,530
    edited March 2019
    Staying with cousins my own age who lived in the country and had a big garden.  I enjoyed just digging, for no purpose, in an unused patch of garden, and we started finding potatoes. They weren't grown deliberately, it was just where my auntie had chucked out the peelings.  So we got them all out and she cooked them for our dinner.

    Then, when I was eight, we moved from a flat to a house with a garden, and I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.  I bought myself a little tortoise, they could be legally imported back then, much too young and small to survive the winter.  My dad used chicken mesh to fence off a corner of the garden for the tortoise, he tried to climb over and got trapped with his head and front legs through the mesh.  We extricated him and he never tried to escape again.
  • B3B3 Posts: 27,505
    We didn't have much of a garden. I remember being fascinated by a local allotment. I sneaked in there one day to look at the plants. It was like another world. Within minutes an angry old b***** chased me out.
    Not a happy memory but I remember that fleeting feeling.
    In London. Keen but lazy.
  • SuesynSuesyn Posts: 664
    We had an old apple tree leaning against the fence, I spent hours sitting up in that tree reading a book. Also used to gather Moss off the outhouse roof to make a miniature garden for the family in my dolls house. Oh, and helping my mum to weed, I've been doing it ever since. 
  • NollieNollie Posts: 7,529
    edited March 2019
    Just having a garden for the first time, when we moved to a house with one when I was six, was awesome. Mum wasn’t much of a gardener or cook, but I remember her growing potatoes and carrots in a patch at the back. Being allocated a small rockery area to plant, with the aid of a birthday present, a Percy Thrower book on gardening - now that ages me  :D
    Mountainous Northern Catalunya, Spain. Hot summers, cold winters.
  • AnniDAnniD Posts: 12,585
    edited March 2019
    Helping my nan to plant her summer bedding in the front garden. It was always red salvias, blue lobelia and white alyssum (sp). I was allowed to make the holes with a dibber, fill them with water,  then nan would put the plants in and we would firm the soil. l also had a little flower bed near the dustbin (!) where l sowed marigold seeds and the like. She also had lilac bushes, they were so pretty and the perfume was lovely. Also a pink rose bush, no idea which variety it was, l have never been able to recapture that colour and perfume......
  • Hampshire_HogHampshire_Hog Posts: 1,089
    Using the old push mower in my grandparents garden the lawns were always immaculate and cut but I would walk up and down for hours pushing that old mower never cutting a blade of grass I think it was the mechanical noise and motion of the blade that fascinated me of course at that time I had no idea how it worked it just did.

    "You don't stop gardening because you get old, you get old because you stop gardening." - The Hampshire Hog
  • raisingirlraisingirl Posts: 7,093
    Being sent up the garden on Sunday mornings to pick runner beans and mint to make mint sauce for lunch (Mum would have mint sauce with any roast lunch, not just lamb. Big fan of mint sauce, my mother). The smell of that particular strain of mint is very evocative of 'home'. Happily, I have some of it in my garden here  :)
    Gardening on the edge of Exmoor, in Devon

    “It's still magic even if you know how it's done.” 
  • Dave HumbyDave Humby Posts: 1,145
    As a 7 year old playing badminton on my parents farm clover 'lawn' all through the summer of '76 and getting multiple bee stings week after week!
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