Bonfire night and memories of gardens in The View from the Terrace

It was bonfire night yesterday and we spent an enjoyable half an hour watching the fireworks in the village display from our house. We can only see the rockets because of the hill but they looked very pretty lighting up the sky in greens and golds and reds above the trees. There was another firework party about a half a mile away and at times it looked as if they were competing with each other, a sort of Duelling Banjos with fireworks!

Watching the fireworks brought back happy memories of taking the children to the village display and of my childhood when bonfire night was a really big event. In those days children could buy fireworks and we used to save them up, buying a few each week with our pocket money and keeping them in a tin box at home. We didn’t have a garden at the pub, just a concrete yard, so I didn’t have a bonfire until after we left. We moved when I was 11 on November 4th and I begged Dad for a bonfire. He spent the whole first day in our new home finding wood and building one in our back garden. He was a wonderful father. I lost him to lung cancer when I was 15 but I had the best dad in the world throughout my childhood and I am grateful for that.

I think I get my love of gardening from my dad. Yesterday was fine and sunny, if rather cold, so I wrapped up warm and went into the garden. I managed to plant 2 more wallflowers. It comes to something when planting 2 wallflowers becomes something to celebrate but I find getting down to ground level rather difficult nowadays. I will keep going as long as I can though. Pots, window boxes and hanging baskets are easier as I can do those on a bench.

There is a man halfway down our lane who is well into his 80s and he has an amazing garden with lots of flower beds. He is always out there when I go past. When he isn’t gardening he goes on walks with the village rambling society. I think if my father had lived to grow old he might have been like that. He retired in his mid 50s because of ill health and spent the next 3 years in the garden. The first house we lived in after we left the pub was a pretty little semi with quite a big garden. He dug up the lawn in the front and filled it with roses. He said there was no point in having a lawn in a front garden. The back was well laid out so he didn’t change much of that but made a vegetable garden at the side, put up a greenhouse and grew strawberries in a trough against the kitchen wall. Then, after all of that my parents decided the road behind the house was too noisy and they moved again after a year. The road was noisy. In those days it was the Shrewsbury by pass and the main route from the midlands to North Wales. On summer weekends you couldn’t hear yourself speak in the garden. They had bought the house in November and hadn’t realised how bad it would be. Ironically, with the new Shrewsbury ring road built in the 1990s that road is now a quiet little backwater.

The next house was a bigger detached place in a very quiet road. I couldn’t sleep at night at first because there was no noise! I had lived my whole life next to a main road first at the pub and then the little semi. It scared me that I could hear owls hooting. The house had a long back garden with 2 lawns and pretty flower beds but the bottom half was just wild. Dad laid out a vegetable patch, put up another greenhouse and filled it with tomatoes. I don’t know why he grew so many tomatoes, we had far more than we could eat or make into chutney so he gave them away to friends and neighbours. Whenever we couldn’t find Dad we knew he would be in the greenhouse.

After 2 years in the big house we moved to the bungalow in Bognor Regis. Dad didn’t get to do much to that garden. He only had one summer there and was already ill, but he planted some roses. He sparked my interest in gardening with the roses. He taught me how to prune them and dead head them. After he died I took over care of the roses and helped with the rest of the garden. Nowadays when I am in my garden pruning or dead heading roses Dad is always with me.