Why a sudden and longed for summer which features actual sunshine and proper heat should make me rather sad, I do not know. But it has.
In my garden, I grow flowers in colours that I wouldn’t wear, probably; or knit. However I do love pink, that is true. Loving pink may be my defining ‘thing’. I really hope it isn’t, but I have a feeling that it could be. I do wear pink sometimes. Usually at the gym. One of the boldest flowers in my garden is a bright pink phlox:
This is my phlox, with a clashy orange flower behind. I was still deep in my Christopher Lloyd phase.
The scent of a phlox is odd – not unpleasant, but not as sweet as the appearance of the flowers might suggest. It is also one of those scents that has the power to overwhelm you in a tidal wave of remembered days, dragged out of the past and tumbled into your present-day. An undignified and jumbled heap of memories, conjured by a side-swipe from a flower.
It gives out its strongest scent in the evening, the phlox. One evening this week I was gardening in the border where the phlox grow. I was in fact uprooting the spent foxgloves and tipping their sand-fine seeds onto bare patches of earth to provide me with more foxgloves next year. Foxgloves remind me of my father. A lot of gardening activities and flowers do that because we gardened together, from when I was a small child until the year before his death. ‘You only ever need to plant one foxglove, Al’, said dad, ‘because it makes a thousand seeds; just don’t pull them out until they are ready and don’t hoe.’ But, if you plant two very different foxgloves – say, one white, or cream, and one purple – over the next few years, they will mingle and interbreed and reward you with lovely, unexpected variations.
So I was shaking the seeds out, trying to remember which plants had been so lovely, for some had come up wearing white ‘gloves’ with deep purple splashes in its throat, and I was as usual when dealing with the foxgloves, thinking – slightly, gently but not deeply – of dad. And I brushed past the phlox. It released its odd, clove-and-vanilla scent in a puff, a cloud that caught me totally off my guard.
In a frozen moment, staring down at the soil, I felt I was back in another garden. Not my childhood garden. My aunt’s. Aunt Edith had a suburban garden in Denton, Greater Manchester, with a square front lawn, prone to flooding in the winter due partly to the clay and also the tilt of the land. Around this small lawn, flowering at this time of year, she grew the most prolific phlox I have ever seen. The tall, more leggy phlox that is less fashionable now. In whites, pale mauve and pale pink. Far more attractive than the vivid pink ones I have grown, and far more scented.
Dad and I – and I am about eight years old – are tidying the garden for Aunt Edith in return for which dad will be allowed to dig up small clumps of the phlox to take to our own garden. As we work, dad tells me about the phlox and why they smell strongest in the evening. Why the colours are pale and luminous. And why they are one of his favourite flowers.
Then we soak newspaper and dig up the clumps of phlox. We gently fold the sopping paper around the roots and dad cuts off the flowers and many of the leaves, because this will reduce the shock. We carefully lay the parcels in the boot of the Anglia, which is marginally less stifling than the passenger areas of the car, and we take them home.
This is a journey of some 200 miles, for we then lived in Northamptonshire. On the way home, we sing, usually ‘She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain When She Comes’, ‘Cockles and Mussels’, and some Methodist hymns in which dad attempts to teach me to harmonise with limited success. On the way, we’ll stop for his favourite motorway snack – coffee and a terrible English version of the American donuts he loved so much. At Kettering, we’ll ring mum from a coin box, but only giving three rings so she knows we are half an hour away.
When we get home, it’s almost dark, though still hot outside. The phlox have to be our priority, so by torch light, and before we eat, we heel the plants into the earth of our own garden and soak them with buckets of water, puddling the water around with small barricades of muddy soil. We are hot, we are dirty, hungry and tired. I am eight, he must have been in his late forties. We are delighted.
The phlox from Aunt Edith’s garden lived on in our garden, though dad always said they weren’t as good as hers due to the different soil. Not clay.
One brush from a far inferior phlox in my garden, all those years later and I am rushed back in time. I can see my dusty white pumps. I can smell the wet newspaper. It hurts so much, I wish I couldn’t.
This garden of mine is the first garden I have ever had that my dad never saw for we moved here, away from Burnham-on-Sea and all its associated memories, after his death. In all the other gardens I have tended, whether as a tenant or house-owner, dad regularly visited, less so as he aged; and I’d prepare extra-hard for his visits, to show him something lovely and good. To show him, I suppose, that I had learned so much from him. His delight in my gardens was just as keen as that from his own.
I always just wish – foolish and even maudlin though it it, I know – that I could walk round this garden, the best I think I have ever made, with him. Just once. And when it overcomes me, I wonder too, if other people have these thoughts.
Usually I can just let – or more accurately fail to prevent – the foolish, hopeless wish flash through my head, sharp like a blade but swift so it doesn’t register as pain, and it’s gone and I’m fine. But this summer, perhaps because it’s a proper summer and the foxgloves and the phlox have been so good, I’m not fine.
Here are some other things from the garden this hot proper July.
Angels’ Fishing Rods – grown by me from seed‘Lucifer’ – fiery, out of my usual garden comfort zone and spreading like wild fire round the gardenMore Lucifer – and the roof of the summer housePale lemon hollyhock, complete with fat beeI have had this plant for years but this is the first time it’s flowered properlyThe green apples are a sign of the year wearing on. By September these will be red, it’s an ancient ‘eater’. beloved by the dogs for its fallersFor once, this year, I have spent some time just sitting down
This is my phlox, with a clashy orange flower behind. I was still deep in my Christopher Lloyd phase.
The scent of a phlox is odd – not unpleasant, but not as sweet as the appearance of the flowers might suggest. It is also one of those scents that has the power to overwhelm you in a tidal wave of remembered days, dragged out of the past and tumbled into your present-day. An undignified and jumbled heap of memories, conjured by a side-swipe from a flower.
It gives out its strongest scent in the evening, the phlox. One evening this week I was gardening in the border where the phlox grow. I was in fact uprooting the spent foxgloves and tipping their sand-fine seeds onto bare patches of earth to provide me with more foxgloves next year. Foxgloves remind me of my father. A lot of gardening activities and flowers do that because we gardened together, from when I was a small child until the year before his death. ‘You only ever need to plant one foxglove, Al’, said dad, ‘because it makes a thousand seeds; just don’t pull them out until they are ready and don’t hoe.’ But, if you plant two very different foxgloves – say, one white, or cream, and one purple – over the next few years, they will mingle and interbreed and reward you with lovely, unexpected variations.
So I was shaking the seeds out, trying to remember which plants had been so lovely, for some had come up wearing white ‘gloves’ with deep purple splashes in its throat, and I was as usual when dealing with the foxgloves, thinking – slightly, gently but not deeply – of dad. And I brushed past the phlox. It released its odd, clove-and-vanilla scent in a puff, a cloud that caught me totally off my guard.
In a frozen moment, staring down at the soil, I felt I was back in another garden. Not my childhood garden. My aunt’s. Aunt Edith had a suburban garden in Denton, Greater Manchester, with a square front lawn, prone to flooding in the winter due partly to the clay and also the tilt of the land. Around this small lawn, flowering at this time of year, she grew the most prolific phlox I have ever seen. The tall, more leggy phlox that is less fashionable now. In whites, pale mauve and pale pink. Far more attractive than the vivid pink ones I have grown, and far more scented.
Dad and I – and I am about eight years old – are tidying the garden for Aunt Edith in return for which dad will be allowed to dig up small clumps of the phlox to take to our own garden. As we work, dad tells me about the phlox and why they smell strongest in the evening. Why the colours are pale and luminous. And why they are one of his favourite flowers.
Then we soak newspaper and dig up the clumps of phlox. We gently fold the sopping paper around the roots and dad cuts off the flowers and many of the leaves, because this will reduce the shock. We carefully lay the parcels in the boot of the Anglia, which is marginally less stifling than the passenger areas of the car, and we take them home.
This is a journey of some 200 miles, for we then lived in Northamptonshire. On the way home, we sing, usually ‘She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain When She Comes’, ‘Cockles and Mussels’, and some Methodist hymns in which dad attempts to teach me to harmonise with limited success. On the way, we’ll stop for his favourite motorway snack – coffee and a terrible English version of the American donuts he loved so much. At Kettering, we’ll ring mum from a coin box, but only giving three rings so she knows we are half an hour away.
When we get home, it’s almost dark, though still hot outside. The phlox have to be our priority, so by torch light, and before we eat, we heel the plants into the earth of our own garden and soak them with buckets of water, puddling the water around with small barricades of muddy soil. We are hot, we are dirty, hungry and tired. I am eight, he must have been in his late forties. We are delighted.
The phlox from Aunt Edith’s garden lived on in our garden, though dad always said they weren’t as good as hers due to the different soil. Not clay.
One brush from a far inferior phlox in my garden, all those years later and I am rushed back in time. I can see my dusty white pumps. I can smell the wet newspaper. It hurts so much, I wish I couldn’t.
This garden of mine is the first garden I have ever had that my dad never saw for we moved here, away from Burnham-on-Sea and all its associated memories, after his death. In all the other gardens I have tended, whether as a tenant or house-owner, dad regularly visited, less so as he aged; and I’d prepare extra-hard for his visits, to show him something lovely and good. To show him, I suppose, that I had learned so much from him. His delight in my gardens was just as keen as that from his own.
I always just wish – foolish and even maudlin though it it, I know – that I could walk round this garden, the best I think I have ever made, with him. Just once. And when it overcomes me, I wonder too, if other people have these thoughts.
Usually I can just let – or more accurately fail to prevent – the foolish, hopeless wish flash through my head, sharp like a blade but swift so it doesn’t register as pain, and it’s gone and I’m fine. But this summer, perhaps because it’s a proper summer and the foxgloves and the phlox have been so good, I’m not fine.
Here are some other things from the garden this hot proper July.
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