Gardening
PERENNIAL MEMORIES OF DAD
I was in my mid-teens when my father died in 1964. Heart. He was 51. Photographs taken a few months before his death make him look much older. The army. Cigarettes. Salt.
He had been with the Royal Welch Fusiliers in Hong Kong and Gibraltar. Water polo was his game. ‘The army,’ he said, ‘gave us a tobacco allowance and we were told to take plenty of salt.’ He became addicted. Later, in civilian life, he somehow kept our small family happily together from proceeds earned from a string of unskilled jobs. A ‘Valleys Man’ from South Wales, he worked hard and saved hard, eventually buying a house with a garden that became his (and our) pride and joy. But his salt addiction was unshakeable. He kept a packet of the stuff in the greenhouse, and one abiding memory has him sitting in there on warm summer evenings sprinkling his prize tomatoes with a snowstorm of the fatal crystalline mineral.
He was an untutored gardener, picking up the basic skills as he went along. His fruit and veg yields were legendary; so, too, in due course, his success with flowers – annuals mostly. Seeds, it seemed, germinated as they fell from his fingers onto fertile soil.
Only now, late in my gardening life and with more time at home this year than expected, am I spending time and effort on raising plants from seed. Never one to shy away from a reasonable challenge, I’m kicking off the season with a supposedly tricky customer: the outrageously gorgeous and much coveted blue Himalayan poppy – meconopsis. Tricky because they have a reputation for being difficult to establish. Some are monocarpic, which means the plant dies after flowering. So, year after year, you have to rely on its production of seed to keep it going.
Others are short-lived perennials. All require acid soil. Which we have. I’m trying the bluest of them, Meconopsis Lingholm from seeds supplied by Plant World in Devon, who describe it as being a ‘quite reliable perennial… far superior to M. betonicifolia’. It has, they say, ‘enormous, deep, cobalt-blue flowers, up to four inches across, and is certainly the best blue poppy ever available. It multiplies up each year… in a shady spot with organic-enriched soil.’ That we have. Plant World then throws down the gauntlet: ‘We challenge you to grow these gorgeous plants, and we will gladly buy seed back from you or exchange it for seeds from our catalogue.’
Annuals have hitherto played a minor role in my own gardening life. But this year, remembering my father’s summerlong colourful abundance of feathery cosmos, fragrant stocks and sweet peas, I’m aiming to summon up the ghost of his luxuriant displays. Nasturtiums are all too common to bother with, I hear people say. But the breeders and selectors have been busy. ‘Empress of India’ is as exotic-looking as it sounds – deep ruby-orange flowers over dark green foliage repeat all summer long. ‘Black Velvet’ is even duskier, a moody interweaving yet compact grower to contrast seductively around the feet of sweet pea vines, especially the blues. I’m growing two such favourites, the old (19th-century) scented ‘Lord Nelson’ and the highly fragrant bi-coloured magenta and purple ‘Matucana’. Can I persuade them to scramble through my ‘Bengal Crimson’ roses, I wonder?
But when it comes to perfume, especially the kind that wafts on the warmth of a balmy summer evening, there’s no beating night-scented stocks and tobacco plants. Googling the myriad varieties available on a cold spring day was enough to invoke the sweetest (unsalty) memories of a much-loved, ill-fated parent.