One of the reasons I call myself a retro wife is that I seem to enjoy things which have fallen out of fashion for young women. Sewing and baking have been somewhat rehabilitated among twenty and thirty-somethings, but my latest love, gardening, has a long way to go!
I come from a stock of gardeners. My grandmother had a beautiful acre of gardens with flower beds, a fish pond, a rockery, her own strawberry patch and lush green lawns. I spent a lot of time as a child trailing around after her "helping" to weed (pulling out plants and picking flowers mostly!) but I got the bug! And I'm not the only one! 4 of her 5 daughters are also green-fingered.
Now, while I have had the bug for two decades, it is only recently that I have been turned loose on a garden of my own. And I still have the "L Plates" on! Yesterday we gathered our courage and headed to the favourite destination of pensioners across Britain - the Garden Centre!! And despite being the only people there who didn't have silver hair, we had a lot of fun!!
We already had a fair idea of what we wanted having studied our "Flowering Shrub Expert", a gem of a book gifted to us by my mother-in-law and also made an emergency call to my aunt (one of the aforementioned 5 daughters!) to ask "Whats the red stick-y thing?!". Turned out it was a dogwood - good to know as I'd have been a bit embarrassed to describe it like that to the very helpful lady at the garden centre! I had already suffered through the indignity on a previous occasion of asking for "those purple ball-y things on wee sticks" (Allium!) Google only helps if you already know the name of the plant!
So we came home £50 lighter, carrying a Butterfly Bush, a Dogwood, a Potentilla (wonderfully named Mango Tango) and a Japonica as well as some pretty little polyanthus to plants among my grape hyacinths. I'm really excited about planting them (hopefully tomorrow!) The trick is now not to kill them - no mean feat for a woman affectionately known as the House Plant Murderer!!
