Wednesday, February 17, 2010

A Pleasant Surprise

Years ago, I had an extensive garden. It seems almost a life time ago now. An old run down cottage, hard earth & years of rubbish & rubble being dug in back in the days when they buried broken glass, bottle & old tin rather than dump it, eventually got transformed into an oasis almost in the central city.

Much time was spent pouring over gardening books, seed catalogues, & bulb lists. Many dollars were spent both at plant nurseries & bringing seed unavailable here in from the UK & Australia. I literally lived, breathed & ate (when I stopped long enough to eat) 'garden'. A penchant for the exotic & the plants that were a bit different caused all sorts of learning curves, but learn I did.

The darn thing was ever expanding too. It started as narrow strips up the side of the path, which gradually grew curves & then got wider & wider. I well recall my parents arriving one evening when I was 'just straightening the edges' (which of course involved removing a few inches of lawn with the spade) & my witty 12 year old son saying "You know Nana, one day you are going to arrive here & there will be no lawn left". How well he knew me.

It was my first real garden, the one that I had complete control over. Over time my tastes changed & I developed of love for the plainer species of the many genus of plants that I acquired. Some travelled with me to the next garden, but many didn't. By the time I got to the third garden I was renting - so very few went along for the ride. To this day I miss that first garden.

One thing that has made it through subsequent gardens is an old oak half barrel, with some gnarl y looking old patio rose in it. I dont even particularly like the rose & the barrel is getting a bit past it. The only reason the rose hasn't been ripped out & dumped is that I was sure that there were some Phacelia campanularia seeds lying dormant in the soil. But no, three years later & there is no sign of them (talk about holding out hope!lol!). Then there were the strappy leaves of something mysterious, that started out grass size & could possibly be one of my gladioli species, that kept coming up every year while getting progressively larger...but not flowering.

This year the strappy leaves flowered! Twelve years after leaving my first garden I have part of it with me again.



Meet Gladiolus papilio

2 comments:

Babyboy said...

Now which son was that cos i do not believe I would say such a thing? If you are talking about the garden i grew up in, i still remember and loved it. It was my battlefield as a child.

Deb said...

No my sweet - it was not you. It was the older baby boy...the one that would never ask his mother if she were having a late life crisis ;)