Passing on the love of gardening to my daughter

Cut flowers from my early summer garden: purple and white sweet rocket, lime green euphorbia, allium “Purple Sensation” and pink Valerian.

I have just been sitting in the sun, enjoying my garden and listening to two blackbirds singing a duet, as they vie for top place in the avian hit parade (now there’s a phrase we don’t often hear these days!). I adore their song, so beautiful and heartbreaking in equal measure.

Regular readers will know that I cover various subjects in this fortnightly Substack, but at this time of the year it is more often than not, gardens that are on my mind. And so, this week, we have a vase filled with flowers cut from my borders and a video of one of my early summer borders showing how I responded to one of the most important lessons I ever learned about planting. But first, a little story about a different garden.

All the years spent taking my twin daughters to gardens every weekend when they were little may be starting to pay off. Almost as soon as they could walk, my girls accompanied their Dad and me around the grand grounds of National Trust properties and RHS Wisley, and also the more modest plots of ordinary individuals opened for charity under the NGS Yellow Book scheme.

Every weekend throughout spring, summer and autumn, we would find out what was open and head off, me to gain knowledge and inspiration, they, enticed by the promise of squash and cake, and with the chance to explore new places. Generally, they behaved very well and people were remarkably tolerant if they transgressed a little, rolling down slopes and hide and seeking in shrubberies.

Now, at 27, my daughters are at a stage where they are interested in interiors and gardens. They are renting a house together, along with Connie’s boyfriend and are excited about furnishing the place in their own style. The house comes with a neglected back garden: there is a patio, (with a table and four chairs I found for fifty quid in a charity shop), a small patch of grass and what were once borders around three sides.

The girls had largely ignored the garden, as they did at their previous rental, until the grass grew tall, Green Alkanet proliferated, and brambles climbed through the one (unpruned) rose. Their long curving, thorny stems began to layer, root in the ground and creep along the fences taking over in that insidious way that only brambles can. It was time to take action!

Connie prefers sitting in the garden to working in it, so when Hattie suggested she might try to tame the wilderness, Connie readily agreed. An outdoor cupboard contained a few tools including a strimmer, so Hattie attacked the lush, long grass, slicing it down to the ground. She was rather dismayed to find this left her with a square of yellowed sward, but I’ve explained this will come back once we get some rain.

Then photographs began to pop up on my phone accompanied by questions

“Is this a weed, Mum?”

“Should I use the secateurs to cut this back?”

“How do you prune Wisteria?”

I said I would go round (they live 10 minutes’ walk away) and have a look to advise on what further action she should take.

This all took me back to the moment when I first became interested in gardening in my twenties. I wrote about it back in 2022 on Home Truths and include an extract from that piece here as it so resonates with what is going on for my daughter, Hattie now.

NB. You can find the original piece called “WHY DO WE GARDEN? (PART ONE) in the archive. Do read it if you didn’t see it originally – there’s a great picture of me as a chubby-faced baby in the arms of my lovely Mum, in our back garden in Belfast.

MY GARDEN BEGINNINGS

“The first time I owned a garden, it was at the back of a sweet, two-up, two-down cottage in a long street of Victorian houses on the outskirts of London. My then partner and I had managed to get a mortgage, and this was to be our very own, first home. We had chosen the house for its situation and the fact that it had just been completely renovated by a builder so there was little to do except paint walls and buy furniture. The garden came with it, and much as we had specifically wanted outdoor space, we hadn’t a clue about how to look after a garden aside from cutting the lawn.

We had moved from rented accommodation, where one of our house-mates gardened. I would watch him out of an upstairs window, working for hours and puzzle over what, exactly, he was doing and, more importantly, why? I just couldn’t understand the attraction. (I later discovered he was growing cannabis!)

Then we moved to our Victorian cottage with its 45 ft long garden and I realised I needed to learn fast if we weren’t going to end up being surrounded by a jungle. There were regular calls to my mother, so much so that she began to answer, with laughter in her voice, “Hello, gardening helpline!”. When she visited, I’d walk her round the garden and ask endless questions, “What is this shrub?”, “What could I plant that would look nice here?”, “What do I need to do with this climbing rose?”.

And so, I gradually learned, as most gardeners do, by trial and error. It’s only by making mistakes, or seeing others make them, that we begin to understand what works and what doesn’t. It’s only by growing plants ourselves that we understand how they look, how much space they take up and which are good companions for one another, both aesthetically and practically. We begin to realise that just sticking plants into dry under-nourished soil, isn’t enough to allow them to flourish. We learn that all plants have a preferred place in the garden, with the right soil, the right amount of moisture and the right level of sunshine or shade: try to grow them in a situation they don’t like and are not naturally attuned to and they will not thrive”.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Back to Hattie’s garden. Once I arrived, I discovered she had begun a serious onslaught on the weeds. I had taken some tools with me and in no time, I too was pruning, chopping, digging and prising: piles of weeds and pruning began to grow on the lawn which we bagged up for me to bring back here to put in our council compost bin.

I then got out the edge cutter and worked along, trying to demarcate the edges of the borders that had once been there. When we had dug over the soil, it all looked so much neater and Hattie had begun to learn her first lessons about being a gardener. Here she is in her tidy, if rather sparse and dry, garden.

Hattie has had a sprinkler on the lawn to try to green it up and next we are going to plan what she can plant in the borders: I will choose easy shrubs and perennials that don’t need too much attention, and we will plant up a large pot or two (using one to try to disguise the drain cover in the middle of the lawn) with colourful bedding plants.

It’s satisfying and fun seeing the transformation and I feel real pride in being able to pass on my gardening knowledge, just as my mother did to me.

Here, to end, is that video of one of my early summer borders.

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FOOTNOTE

You’re reading Home Truths, from me, Susy Smith. I write here on an eclectic mix of subjects about home and lifestyle. I am many things: a parent of grown-up kids, a dog owner, a gardener and a compulsive mover of vases (I worked for years as a stylist). I am also a writer/editor and former Editor-in-Chief of British Country Living Magazine.