Happibun

I don’t think of myself as a gardener, really I don’t. It is as though I have become one by default, though caring about, and inexpertly tending a tiny patch of soil in Lincolnshire; which came, almost as an afterthought with a tiny terraced house that I bought with my ex husband 10 years ago.

I don’t come from a family of gardeners. My mother kills plants by just looking at them, and my father, after separating from my mum, lived in a flat until he moved in with his partner who has a tiny London patio garden. She gardens, he tinkers with computers. My grandparents were no better, the ones on my father’s side had gardeners to tend their estate. Mind you, the ones on my mother’s side grew potatoes, and so were perhaps the nearest thing to green fingered relatives that I had.

Gardens in my youth were universally green (with a speckling of yellow dandelions), and shaggy. We were better at raising frogs and toads in the nearby ponds than we were blooms. The most successful plant that my mother ever grew was a multifloribunda rose bush that got plonked to the side of the overgrown grass patch that was euphemistically called our front lawn. Amazingly, it grew and flowered profusely over the years despite total neglect and a thriving population of greenfly: that is until a friend accidentally reversed over it in his car rendering it multimoribunda.

During my teen years and those as a student, I lived in shared digs. Occasionally I’d rear a straggly Spider Plant in a pot, and for some years I had some success with a Venus Flytrap called George. The problem with indoor plants and a student lifestyle, is that you have to leave them for great lengths of time. George in particular needed to be kept wet, and with distilled water too. His demise came about when I entrusted him to the current boyfriend, who fed him too many flies and administered tap water. Upon returning and finding my pride and joy had become a soggy black mass; I would love to be able to say that I rendered the boyfriend thus also. I didn’t, but then he didn’t last much longer anyway.

During the early years of married life, we lived in a succession of rented flats and houses. The garden didn’t really figure in any of them. Some did not have one at all, others, we were beseeched not to touch. So the first garden that I really had was this one, in the house that I am in now.

I have always enjoyed tinkering with it, and through it I have developed an interest in gardening. I find weeding and dead heading very therapeutic, especially since my divorce :-/