Earliest gardening memories?
Minosgardener
Posts: 95
My grandfather spent a lot of his time gardening and loved his garden. I would be sent off there for periods of time when I was little and loved following him around the garden having instructions barked at me.
I also remember him giving me a handful of soil that was hot to the hand and was all crumbly. At the time I thought he hand taken it out of the oven, only as an adult now I realise he was showing me the compost he had made in his pile. He gave me a rhubarb to take home and grow and I lovingly tended it. Alas my mother had no interest in gardening nor cooking and it was disaposed of by her.
It's funny how something such as those memories can have such a lifelong profound impact. As I am planning and working in my garden I do wonder what he would think? I hope he would at least be pleased with my interest in compost! He had a very small lawn area and I think that has influenced my lack of interest in grass.
What are your earliest memories and influences?
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Im sure your grandad would be impressed and pleased with your garden
Im very similar to you, although we always grew all our own veg at home and my mother is an incredibly keen gardener, it was grandad who had the time and patience to let me "help", his garden was like a wonderland to me, to this day, i remember sowing stocks in a circle he had made in one of his borders with the bottom of a bucket, i couldnt have been more than 5 or 6. funny how things stick in your mind! I was often reffered to as his shadow, happy days
The scent of stocks instantly transports me back to the age of 5 when we stopped at a park for a picnic lunch en route to Devon. It was a long journey in the days before motorways but one full of excitement and anticipation for the holiday to come.
It was a hot day & the air was full of the spicy, heady scent of stocks. I grow them in my own garden now and will forever associate them with hot sunny days, holidays, and scotch eggs with tomatoes
Other early memories - being shown how to make snapdragons 'snap' by grandpa and making finger gloves out of foxglove flowers.
Happy days
I think we may be related Pansyface ...
I feel a bit like I was born in a garden, I spent a lot of time in the garden as a toddler discovering earwigs and things. It led to a lifetime interest in wildlife. I particularly remember my Dad finding a newt at the base of a wall and showing it to me when I was very young and I ended up working with them as an adult.
Another memory was a year when it snowed in the morning and in the afternoon it was a bright sunny day and my Dad was pruning apple trees using a ladder. I remember them as really quite big trees because we use to climb them often.
Flowers I remember in our garden at home were roses, snapdragons, violets and primroses in borders. My sister and I use to pick bunches of flowers at Easter to give to Mum out of the garden each year.
Happy memories, Mum and Dad are both gone now but I remember how we were always out there in the garden if it was not pouring rain, I'm still that way inclined to this day.
My earliest gardenig memories are from when I was three and a half - I remember helping to plant crocus corms under gooseberry bushes at the kindergarten; granny's gardener showing me how horrid prickly branches magically grew raspberries on them; granny's garden with Wanda primroses growing amongst moss by the steps up through the hazel bushes; helping my grandma to save the lupin seeds in brown paper bags and the magic of sitting under the weeping elm in our garden and looking up at the sky through the branches and seeing the transluscence of the new leaves in the spring
When I was a little older I remember my younger brother watching granny's gardener spiking the lawn and deciding he was going to help - and he stuck the fork right through his sandal and speared his foot to the lawn! He had to go to hospital for a tetanus injection! Always wear sturdy shoes when spiking the lawn!
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Stroking the inside of a broad bean pod and thinking it was velvet like my party dress and making slap dab pies when I was helping dad ..
When my dad threatened to dig a hole & bury me!
I loved listening to my nanna talking about the war years when she grew veg in the back garden. I must have only been about 5 or 6. She grew stuff with her neighbours.
My dad didn't like gardening, he cemented over the back garden when we were little, I would climb over the wall as soon as I was able to play in the neighbours garden and often couldn't get back, I was forever in trouble for doing it. She had an old shed with a hole in the roof so I'd climb in with my brothers, we would pretend it was a spaceship taking us to Mars and beyond. Me thinks we probably watched to much Star Trek
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Our house backed onto fields and old allotments which now I realise must have been left after the war. I have happy memories of days lost playing there. In the summer we'd often be out all day, my mum who baked at least twice a week would give us a plastic bowl and we'd go out picking stuff like gooseberries, blackberries and raspberries.
Happy days
My dad growing vegetables, cabbages, carrots and all the things that we grew in the early years after the war. Him bringing in an armful of something for dinner. He had no truck with flowers in the garden, but did allow my mum to grow sweet peas around near the door, and he did love the wild flowers. There were plenty then, cowslips nearby in huge swathes, kingcups in a wild pond, primroses, especially on the railway banks, daffodils, often where people threw them out and they colonised the roadsides, sweet violets - those flowers he liked, but not ones grown by us - waste of food space he thought. I do so wish now - he's very long gone - that I had paid more attention then, but when you are young and foolish you sometimes think your parents are old and foolish - just as I am now I guess!!