When I was old enough to push the mower I was the one who took over lawn duties from my dad. It wasn’t much of a lawn. Just enough for myself, my sister and three brothers to run around on, make forts or do handstands. Mum was the gardener. She would point at things and ask me to prune or cut or dig. There was the ongoing battle with the holly tree whose prickles I still remember and the reason why there is no Japanese holly in my garden.
As teenagers we were made to do ‘work experience’. For me I joined the Taggart twins, Frankie and Michael at the Bishop’s house in Plymouth on Thursday afternoons to tend the garden; striped lawns and weeding. It was fun enough, and there was more time spent in the enormous kitchen scoffing homemade cakes and biscuits that the two Irish housekeepers baked in a continuous production line.
It wasn’t until I was 36 that I attempted to make a garden. I was renting a flat in Bath and sharing with some friends I made at university. It was a book I bought in 2006 about called Japanese Gardens and Their Surroundings by Edward S Morse that started an interest in traditional Japanese architecture and gardens, which were so different to what I’d seen in the UK. It was that book that initiated me the first of many trips to Japan, and create a small garden on the porch roof of a rented maisonette. The garden lasted six months before the landlord found out and asked me to take it down. I had to wait another ten years before Jake and I bought a home before I could start on a garden proper.