Flowers have always played such an important part in my life. As a child growing up and now as an adult, flowers evoke strong memories and always cheer me up when I am feeling sad. A quick look at my Instagram will reveal a bit of an obsession with flower photos. They make perfect subjects, they look pretty, don’t run around or pull faces and they look so nice from every angle.
But can I grow flowers? No, I can not.
I have this year discovered the joy of petunias and so far, fingers crossed, they have been a success and I have a few pots filled with those gorgeous flowers and so far, I haven’t managed to kill them off, so I am doing quite well.
I would love to have a garden full of flowers. One day, having come to terms with the fact that I am not a gardener myself, I would love to find a gardener who could come and transform my rather sad looking garden into something magnificent and luckily I have discovered that MyBuilder has a great section where you can find a gardener in your local area.
There would be flowers, more flowers, a nice summer house to sit and admire the flowers from and maybe some raised beds so I could try and grow some veggies.
I really should be better at gardening. Any green-fingeredness that I should have inherited has evidently skipped a generation. You see, growing is in my blood. My mum comes from a family steeped in agriculture and she, like her father before her, is a very keen and capable gardener and I am always amazed by her garden every summer.
My granddad was a keen gardener. For many years it was his livelihood. His garden was a labyrinth of plants and flowers with winding paths and greenhouses which offered a new adventure every time you stepped outside. It wasn’t the biggest garden but he made use of every single inch of space and he loved nothing more than giving you a tour of his seasonal crops. Whatever the season, with the air-filled with a variety of scents and everywhere you looked there was a vision of colours, it was a place to take a deep breath and please the senses. As a young girl, I loved nothing more than to explore his garden. With the warm balmy greenhouses filled with the smell of tomatoes and his secrets to growing success and winding uneven paths which lead to more plants and flowers. A tiny lawn, which almost went unnoticed, hidden behind bushes and greenery felt like a secret garden and I would imagine that it was my very own secret garden and there, I had many imaginary battles and adventures or sometimes I would just lie on the grass listening and watching.
Of all of the flowers he grew, Dahlias were my favourite. My granddad’s dahlias were tall, taller than me for many years and I loved the shape of these flowers which always seemed so perfectly symmetrical and for all of their colour and height, there was barely a smell. Whenever I see dahlias now, I am transported straight back to that garden and the many happy hours I spent there.
As hard as I try to be a goddess in the garden it often falls short. Partly due to lack of time, partly due to the frustration that so many plants have come to a sticky end under my careful watch. Cress, I can grow cress. We have one hardy rose that has survived for a few years but apart from that, not a great deal else has survived. I can’t even look after the lawn without blowing up the lawnmower.
Perhaps the only flowers I should have are the ones you can put in a vase. Perhaps the green-fingered gene has missed a generation and one of my children will grow up and create the garden of my dreams? Maybe the time has come to accept that I am destined to have a lawn and not much else, well a lawn and a few petunias maybe?
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I feel your pain! I’d love to be a good gardener too. Well, I’d like to have a garden that stayed beautiful, I’m not sure they’re quite the same things! Weeding is the thing that particularly gets me down, because it’s relentless!
Great stuff. Interesting read!