My Childhood Garden Part V

A Memory of Shamley Green.

Beside the strawberry bed grew a large cooking apple tree that produced enormous green apples. We had a variety of both eating and cooking apple trees in the garden, the fruit from which was harvested and then stored in the autumn. We then enjoyed the fruit well into the winter months cooked or eaten in a variety of ways. My mother could bake an apple pie to die for and this was frequently our dessert, following our traditional Sunday roast, complete with large jug of perfectly made thick yellow creamy custard - and never a lump in sight! When the seasons permitted, the pies or tarts she made varied according to which fruit was ready for picking. e had a Victoria plum, pear and peach trees too, from which the fruit was either made into pies or eaten as picked.

Coming back to the large area of the upper back garden that was our vegetable plot, as well as the potatoes, a variety of fruit bushes were also grown ie red and blackcurrant bushes, as well as raspberries, loganberries and gooseberries. There was even an area where my mother grew sweetcorn. There is nothing quite like freshly cropped sweetcorn cooked and eaten within an hour of picking, covered with butter and flavoured with salt and pepper!

As the soil was fine and sandy it dried quickly in the heat from the sun. The vegetables therefore needed daily watering throughout the summer months. Like a ritual each evening, my parents could be seen ferrying water to and fro in watering cans, as well as using a hose, until dusk forced them both back indoors to a well earned cup of tea.

On the opposite side of the lane the front windows of our house (and that included my bedroom) overlooked farm fields and I fondly remember hearing the cows moo, as they munched on the fertile field of grass. Chewing the cud my mother would say, remembering her days as a child living on a farm in faraway Austria where she had grown up on a farm that had a herd of cows that she milked, as part of her daily chores once home from school.

I spent the happiest times of my childhood within this garden doing all the things that most children do such as make mud-pie biscuits, perfume for my mother using fallen rose petals in water and so much more. And this was just the garden. Beyond the garden were hedgerows, a river and riverbanks and fields, not to mention nearby woods and heathland to explore and enjoy once I was old enough to be allowed to go for walks on my own with our dog Niggs.

In autumn time, my father would clear the garden of rubbish, hedge clippings and branches pruned from the trees. Then he would light a bonfire. The smell of those wood fires still lingers in my memory today. He loved his bonfires and I loved nothing more than helping him. I would be wearing a thick woollen jumper that most likely had been knitted by my Mother and warm coat and would stand chattering away to him, as he carefully added bits of collected garden rubbish to the fire. The sparks would fly and the blue smoke would curl upwards and away in the cool of the late autumn breeze.

Other memories that clammer for attention are:

My father showing me Evening Primrose flowers only opening in the evening.
Smelling the gorgeous smell of night scented stock flowers in the evenings.
The little copse behind the garden sheds at top of garden, which I loved to explore, even though told numerous times not to!
The compost heap where my father often found adders enjoying the warmth it generated.
The old push mower my father used to mow the lawns, and the wonderful smell of cut grass after.
The 1p I earned for each cabbage white butterfly caught to protect our cabbages from them laying eggs and the resultant caterpillars that then ruined our leafed vegetables.
The 3 baby blackbirds I hand reared after their nest was destroyed.
Mother's Day each spring when my sister and I would explore the oasis of wild rhododendron bushes gathering a bunch of flowers made up of catkins, pussywillow and primrose flowers in the farm field opposite our home. A few weeks later, the bunches became bluebells and wood anemones.
Hearing church bells every Sunday, going to Sunday School and eventually joining the choir and having my first crush on one of the members Tom Cornwall was his name, although later I was to actually go out with another member called Chris Harding.
The fox hunts seen most Sunday afternoons galloping across the farm fields opposite each autumn after an elusive fox, and the fox that once ran into our garden, eyes wide with terror and steaming breath panting from an open mouth, body quivering with exhaustion and desperation.
The large oak tree that I witnessed being cut down, whose screaming wrenching tearing noise, as it fell upset me so much I cried.
The sounds of owls hooting, foxes barking, the snorting noises the hedgehogs made and the comical speed when they chose to run across the lawn. Seeing fruit bats at dusk; and with no light pollution of a town seeing the full beauty of the moon and a night sky full of stars.

So long ago now so very long ago.

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