Garden inheritance

We have a very big garden. We love it. We are not very good gardeners but we are learning.

My mum's house with beautiful garden (the farm), her home for nearly 60 years, was sold recently. My home physically until I was eighteen and I think spiritually for a long time there after was sold. It's a sad and reflective time for the family.

I have quite a few friends going though similar experiences. One of them was telling me how she spent an arduous afternoon digging up a peony from her mum and dad's garden before it was sold. Her mum had originally brought it from her mum's so it seemed kind of important to continue with that line of descent. It was huge, dug up on a hot afternoon and then transported 300 miles up the motorway, sat on the passenger seat, belted of course. But it was worth it. She can now see the green shoots of recovery - quite literally.

So with that green inheritance in mind I walked round our garden at 88. I noticed the daffodils, peeping up through the grass. I made a mental note to tell the children not to stand on them while their little shoots were still camouflaged amongst the blades of grass. My Dad planted hundreds of daffs along the banking up the drive to the farm and at the end of the garden. Every spring the drive welcomed you in yellow.

I admired our rowan tree that we planted as a spindly whip about three years ago and how big it's got already. My Mum and I bought Dad a rowan when he retired from farming. He then proceeded to complain every year thereafter that the berries were a browny yellow and not red. Funny thing but last autumn they at last turned red.

I looked at the azalea that Mum and Dad bought for us when our daughter was born. I was concerned last year that it did not flower but I have high hopes that it will burst into vibrant fuchsia pink again around about her birthday in April.

I smiled at the snowdrops up already and the whites of the petals just visible packed tightly into their buds. I remember my Mum urging me to dig up spent snowdrops at the farm for my own garden.

I sat in the garden chair in the cool winter sunshine that my Dad made for me. He had carved my name on the top and had done the same on chairs for the children. A friend always jokes with me that they are the Blakeley Family Inheritance Thrones.

 

I walked through the soggy grass. I love cutting grass. I started cutting the lawn at the farm, all those years ago as a teenager for pocket money. Up and down, up and down with the lawn mower, methodically comforting. I complain every year to David that our lawn mower doesn't make lovely lines in the grass. Well it will this year as we have inherited my mum's.

I have quite a few mementos from the farm around the house at 88, memory reminders of a time, a place, a feeling, a person. It would seem I have a huge green and living inheritance too.