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Some of you are still nudging me to keep publishing so….

Anne Wareham, editor

Holt House 1939

My First Garden by Valerie Lapthorne

Dirt. Not dirt in the American sense of earth, but dirt that was dust and fragments of sandstone, brick, charred wood and lumps of glass.  This dirt was now to be my garden. It had once been my grandfather’s house and garden. Its misfortune, however, was to have been in the direct line of fire from the German bombers of World War II that were aiming for the Cammell Laird ship yard in Birkenhead in January 1941. And missed.

Holt House 1941

My grandfather and father and sundry relatives all set about building two bungalows on the bombed site, one for us and one for Grandfather.  My mother took up residence during the day on a stripy deckchair with her knitting and described to me the garden that she and I were going to create. Dirt was good for drawing in with hands and feet. I gathered small pieces of glass, brick, slate, wood and melted pieces of metal and arranged them as flowers in the borders traced in the dirt.  The original house had large cellars and excess rubble was barrowed into these. Terraces were built from the intact sandstone building blocks and backfilled with even more rubble until there were flat surfaces on the terraces.

And Mum knitted.  And the rosebay willow herb and buddleia grew up around us, taller and taller. Field poppies and dandelions grew from the barren cracks and I paved my paths with debris.

One afternoon, the routine changed a little. Grandfather appeared with some wooden greengrocers’ boxes, filled with real soil and a brown envelope with miniscule shiny black seed. Pansies, he informed me. He explained the process of germination and I set to, the seeds disappearing as soon as they hit the surface of the soil. It was inevitable that I was somewhat disappointed with the rate or rather non-rate of germination at first, but as soon as the first cotyledons appeared above the surface, I was hooked. Grandad mounted window panes across some sandstone blocks for an instant cold frame and I was able to stow my seed trays underneath. We had no trouble with slugs. They had probably all fried in the bomb blast.  I never questioned why there were ruins of houses in our street. I don’t even think I associated the mounds of rubble with houses. They were just exciting places where the neighbourhood boys built dens and forts, and which were out of bounds to me.  Anyway, I was making a garden.

No such thing as garden centres then, so no easy sourcing of plants.  Woolworths sold seed and Mum and I would choose a packet or two, when out shopping, perhaps lettuce, radish and nasturtiums, which were far more satisfying as they became recognisable plants more speedily than the pansies. The acceptable way to acquire plants was by scrounging cuttings or splitting perennials from other gardens.  This was not as easy as it sounds as all the houses that were still standing, had the same dirt and rosebay willowherb. The scrounging had to be done from relatives who lived in posh 1930s semis on the outskirts, away from the shipyards. The plants that were offered were those that were garden thugs that they were happy to “share”.  As it happened, we were more than grateful to accept them.  We had a lot of empty space to fill.

A trip I most enjoyed was taking the wheelbarrow to Forizo’s, a horticultural supplier about two miles distant. On the way there, I could either push or ride in the barrow. Riding was preferable after a while, as the barrow’s handles were on the wide side.

On the shop floor of Forizo’s were the garden sundries, tools, cans of poisons, balls of twine, and upstairs in the hayloft, accessible by a narrow open wooden staircase, were sacks of fertiliser, blood, fish and bone, potash, various mixes of nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium, a smell up here like no other.  A chemistry set for the green fingered alchemist. The sacks were hauled up from the street by a sack hoist, the operator swinging himself into space to grab the sack and heave it in.  The wheelbarrow held two heavy sacks, so we always took a breather at the top of the hill on the way home, sitting on the railing-denuded park wall.

Grandfather and me. Note the rows of bedding

In the meantime, houses complete, Grandfather had rescued the coal-fired boiler and under floor heating pipes from the conservatory attached to the old house, and cobbled together a greenhouse at the end of the property from salvaged window frames.  All the window frames were uneven as they had different sources. It didn’t bother me. I didn’t know what a greenhouse should have looked like. Every time we acquired a better window, it was spliced in. This meant that we could grow tomatoes. It didn’t take long to be up and running. Seeds were sown and seedling tomatoes pricked out directly into the floor-I can’t yet say it was soil- of the greenhouse.  After our mid-day meal, I would be given the job of rubbing out the unwanted side shoots of the tomato plants and tying in the upward growth. Grandfather would take up a position at the end of the greenhouse on a deckchair and light up a large cigar.   This was the way he fumigated the greenhouse, he tells me. It was many years before I realised that cigar smoking was not confined to fumigating greenhouses.   Once I packed my suitcase and ran away, but only got as far as the greenhouse.  Happiness is the smell of tomato sap and cigar smoke.

We acquired some bare root shrubs and trees by mail order from advertisements on the back of the Daily Express.  The success rate was poor.  They arrived wrapped in newspaper or straw inside thick brown paper and the roots were already desiccated when they arrived. I planted six apple trees which arrived by this route.  Five died despite loving care, and one survived. It was years later that we were advised that it was an elder, which explains the absence of apples.

There was no one around to advise us what to do. Grandfather was our expert on tomatoes and dahlias and potatoes.  He always planted potatoes on Good Friday, which defied all logic. If Good Friday were a static date, one could argue that the soil would be warm enough by then. Perhaps it was an Irish thing.  Perhaps potatoes need a holy blessing against blight.  Mum read the picture strips of Adam the Gardener in the Sunday Express and we had a dog-eared copy of Adam the Gardener, “Gardening Week by Week”. The only bedding plants grown were alyssum, salvia, marigolds, heliotrope, tagetes and lobelia, all planted in tufts in straight lines with far too much bare soil between, which necessitated a lot of weeding. Not that I minded. There was satisfaction in seeing a weed free border. 

A less edifying chore was to go out in the street with a shovel and bucket after the passing of the coalman’s dray pulled by two large carthorses.  Fine if they performed directly outside the house, as I could be in and out quickly, mortifying if I had to walk up the road a little way for this gift for my rhubarb.  We sourced chicken manure from a neighbour and stuffed this into hessian sacks and suspended them on bamboo canes in the rain water tanks to be watered directly onto the tomatoes. It was too strong to use on plants until they were in full growth. I’m happy to say that although it smelt foul, (no pun!) it didn’t affect the taste of the tomatoes one way or the other. We eventually became self-sufficient in vegetables and herbs and soft fruit.  And dahlias.  In her later years Mum said she envied me my clean, insect free veg from Tesco.

Dad was our Heath Robinson.  He became a hoarder of things that could come in handy. The garden itself was a great source of bits and pieces. All rainwater from the greenhouse was collected.  Grey water was redirected from the house to water the two lawns. Carts and trolleys were fashioned from wood and pram wheels.  In the early seventies, as a treat, we took Dad to the Centre for Alternative Technology, at Machynlleth, in Wales, which had just opened. He was unimpressed.   There was nothing new. Dad was using the same and better practices from day to day.  He considered it mainstream not alternative. 

Word spread locally about this half acre garden with verdant lawns, flower beds and bursting vegetable plots, in an area of gardenless Victorian terrace houses. Folk would often be invited in to have a look around and would then return with sundry relatives and Mum would happily be their guide and they usually left with a bunch of sweet peas, a bag of tomatoes or sticks of rhubarb.

Thirty years after I left home, it became increasingly obvious that Dad could no longer manage their garden. He forgot to water seedlings, how to use the lawn mower, couldn’t prune the roses nor trim the shrubs and the decision was made to come live in our village where he could help me in our garden.  It eased the parting from the garden that the property was bought by a family with small children who loved the garden and were happy to care for it. 

When this family moved on, about ten years ago, the house and garden were acquired by a developer to build a block of twelve flats.  The house and the garden were bulldozed and all the sandstone blocks on the site were sold, I am told, for far more than the price of the property. Even the high retaining walls and the three gateways abutting the pavement were sold.  The abandoned plot has again become a forest of buddleia and rosebay willow herb, whose roots push against the rubble and shoots reach towards the sky.

View from the road   2019

Valerie Lapthorne.

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