For as long as I can remember I have had a love of flowers. The village where I grew up, before it got taken over by housing estates was surrounded by fields. I have memories of fields full of buttercups, buzzing with bees. I loved the buttercups but not the bees, I thought they would sting me.
My mother owned a shop--an ironmongers-- we lived at the back of it. It was one of a row of little shops in the village. We didn't have gardens, just backyards. I remember one year when we had seeds for sale in the shop and my two brothers and I sowed flowers seeds in two small beds in the yard. There were Virginia stock, candytuft and cornflowers. I loved the flowers. At the back of our house was some land, it was known as 'the spare ground'. I don't know why it was called this, but I used to play there with my friends. Sometimes I played there on my own and I used to wander around picking the wild flowers which grew there. There were foxgloves, the bees used to hide in the bell shaped flowers, I wasn't keen on that.
I remember my mum taking me to visit someone nearby and it had a beautiful cottage garden. I felt quite overwhelmed by all the lovely flowers. At the back of the row of shops where we lived there was another house with a lovely garden. One day my friend and I were playing nearby and noticed that the garden had a beautiful display of lupins. I can still remember now how colourful they were. My friend and I decided that we would pick some of these lupins for our mums. We each took our bunches of lupins home thinking how pleased our mums would be, only to be shouted at and made to take them back to the owner. We were only about 4 or 5 years old I think. I love lupins and always try to have a few growing in my garden, they still remind me of my childhood and I often think of the time I stole those lupins.
I have my own garden now and my love of flowers has not waned. I have difficulty coming out of a garden centre without buying any plants and I have reached the stage where if I want to plant something new I have to dig another plant up first to make some space.
I particularly like flowers that I can cut to bring in the house. For a year or two now I have been promising myself I will have a cut flower border either in the garden or down at the allotment. I have decided that this year I really will do it. We have more space at the allotment now that we have two plots, I also have a spare
raised bed in the garden where we used to grow vegetables before we got the allotments.
I have bought a selection of annual seeds from Higgledy Garden and I also have various packets of flower seeds which have come free with gardening magazines. I'm dreaming of a patch filled with colour, butterflies flitting around and the gentle hum of bees. I'm all ready to start sowing as soon as the soil warms up.
Fortunately I've overcome my fear of bees.
