Gardening: Nature, Nurture or Necessity?

It’s no secret that over the past year, those of us lucky enough to have gardens have found them a sanctuary during lockdown. I’m lucky to live in my parents house…I say lucky, a chain of unfortunate events has led to me living with my dad at the ripe old age of 33 with my daughter and 2 cats…but that’s a story for another day.

As I was saying, I’m lucky to live in my parents house which has a large-ish garden so we were able to enjoy the outdoor space in Lockdown 1. The house is an ex-council house in a fairly built up area, but back in the 30’s when these houses were built for the London leavers, garden sizes were generous.

Before we went into lockdown in March 2020, gardening had never interested me all that much. I didn’t grow up with an interest in gardening. I liked being outside, I liked to look at plants but I had absolutely no interest in getting my hands dirty – in fact if I didn’t have gloves on I wasn’t touching the ground. I liked it as a space I could entertain friends in – we love a bbq, in fact we’ve been known to be still bbqing in November…Brits *eyeroll*. I’d planted the odd pot, dug a bit and bought the odd bag of shingle over the years but I’d never really emersed myself into creating a space I loved outside. This was really due to a mixture of never owning my own home, and believing that I wasn’t physically strong enough to actually do any of the hard work, and that without a man to help me I’d have to make peace with the overgrown jungle this garden had become. I convinced myself that I wasn’t able to keep plants alive anyway. There was too much to learn and I had no idea where to begin.

If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll know that since then gardening has taken over my life. Once I got into it, it seemed to start coming to me quite naturally, so I started to think about whether a passion for gardening comes via nature, nurture or necessity.

Before: Our rectangular garden

Before: My brother hanging out with the massive (no longer with us) Clematis and greenhouse

Before: Dad and I laying the patio.

My parents dipped in and out of gardening when I was younger. The house we live in now is located on an old kiln site, and our soil is pure clay…as a result, the end of our garden is prone to becoming a bog during the winter and then the whole garden is hard as rock during the summer. I remember we had a plum tree that lived in the boggy end but for some reason or other, it was cut down. Our garden was a rectangular lawn with rectangular borders around the edge, not particularly inspiring but with 2 children and not a lot of disposable cash to spend, it did what it needed to do. When we moved into the house, there was a large greenhouse, which (it pains me now) 11 year old me and my dad dismantled, and laid a patio in its place. We didn’t consider if this patio was in the right place for the garden, we didn’t check where the sun falls first – we built it there because there was already a concrete base from the greenhouse. And of course, we went with yet another rectangle.

Old house: Giving the lads a tour of the garden

Old house: Showing off my massive sunflower

When I was a lot younger; in the house we lived in before this one, my mum had much more of an interest in gardening. She took pride in keeping our garden looking neat and tidy and worked hard nurturing and tending to it. Sometimes, on a Sunday drive, she would suddenly yell at my dad to pull over on a country road so she could take a cutting from some bush or other (absolutely outrageous behaviour). There was definitely some gardening interest in her at that time. I can remember planting sunflowers with my brother in that garden and being so amazed by how tall it got. She continued to garden in our second home, but much more for necessity than for pleasure. She lost interest in a lot of things that once brought her joy due to declining mental health and an unhappy home and marriage. She would prune the bushes from time to time, but much like me, she suffers with anxiety and depression, and looking back it’s very clear that motivating herself to get out and get on wasn’t something she could do.

My dad’s involvement in the garden stretched to mowing the lawn a few times a year and digging everything out of the over grown borders which my mum would then replant…and repeat year after year. He did the big stuff, like the patio, but left my mum to the rest. In fact, I’m pretty sure he only did the lawn mowing because my mum was scared of the mower…I think in an ideal world he’d have avoided the garden all together.

Looking back, I can’t say this late found love of gardening has come from a buried nurtured interest encouraged by my parents. I loved spending time outside and I loved my Wendy house - but I don’t recall any interest in gardening myself back then.

So, I decided to look back a generation further. I can remember my maternal grandparents being much more active in the garden. My nan was big on growing veg, both at home and on her allotment – 2 allotments in fact which were 2 miles apart and she’d walk between the two each day. She was always there, digging away…she was the kind of nan who would come up the road carrying a million heavy grocery bags and make it look like she was carrying helium balloons. She had moved here from Italy to be with my grandfather and I wanted to know more about what her life was like before moving here. From the knowledge she had, I assumed it involved growing crops and after talking to my mum about it, I was right.

When my grandmother was growing up, she would help work her families land with her parents and siblings. They grew grapes for wine, potatoes, olives, onions, garlic, figs, corn, herbs and tomatoes which they would make into passata each summer to store for the winter. Once she moved here, the passion to grow food to sustain her family came with her, although like many over keen veg growers, she often grew more than they could eat. My mum remembers helping her water the allotment, and pruning hedges at home. She particularly remembers being about 8 years old and stepping on an upturned rake, hitting her in the face and giving her a black eye…I can’t help but imagine that scene from The Simpsons…you know which one…Side Show Bob…

My grandfather was a self employed taxi driver, so his involvement in the garden was minimal, my mum said he couldn’t decipher a weed from a plant so left it to his wife. He did the hard landscaping like trimming the topiary hedges, and building walls. One of the bushes was shaped like a chair, I sat in it once…that was a mistake, full of insects!

Italy: My grandmother and her family harvesting corn. She is at the back, her parents are to the left of the photo and her aunts standing in front of her.

My maternal grandparents garden: Grandad giving Monty Don a run for his money with his pruning tekkers.

My maternal grandparents garden: me just chilling in the trees, probably cried loads before getting in.

My maternal grandparents garden: Grandad trimming the topiary chair of spiders.

Looking back now I think gardening and crocheting was my grandmothers way of managing her anxiety. Mental health issues go way back in my family, and I find it fascinating that I now use the same hobbies to manage my own. My own memories of their garden is shelling peas my grandmother had grown with her in the kitchen. They had a beautiful front garden too. They collected rain water, they grew from seed, they made their garden work hard for them whilst not breaking the bank. It might sound like they had a big garden in the country, but in fact they lived in Kingsbury, London with a fairly small plot.

On my paternal side, I knew absolutely nothing about my grandparents gardening. I asked my dad and he said my grandmother had no gardening interest whatsoever. My grandfather however…was a landscape gardener! This was news to me! At home they had a huge garden, around 300ft long, so my grandfather would tend to the first portion but the rest was left wild. He had a greenhouse in which he would potter away, growing seeds and cuttings to sell on. He told me that my grandfather worked for some huge estates on Bishops Avenue in Hampstead, and that as a teen he had gone along to work with him for £3 a week. He regaled a story of going along with his father to a job, which was in fact for the broadcaster Peter Snow! They sat on his rooftop garden to plan the work, how wonderful! He was also contracted to build a wall for one of his clients who didn’t pay him once the job was done, so him and his dad went back in the night and knocked the whole thing down with their sledge hammers…imagine! I never met this man, he died long before I was born, but now I’m starting to see horticulture on both sides of my ancestry.

My Aunt, my dad’s sister, has a natural creative talent in pretty much everything – her gardens and house plants have always been stunning. I loved her garden as a child. It was designed in a way to create natural rooms so we would run around with our cousins exploring and playing. There was always something to look at, such a vast contrast to my own rectangular garden.

Now: My daughter, Elliotte, enjoying her mini garden…maybe more enjoying the ice lolly.

When I started tackling our overgrown garden in March 2020, I believed it was for necessity. Not only did it desperately need doing, I needed an outlet to manage my mental health and at the time I’d lost my crochet mojo. I didn’t have anyone who could help me with the garden, so I had to push my believed physical boundaries to get on with it myself. I didn’t have disposable income to waste, so I had to find ways to make the space better for free. The more I did, the more I learnt, the stronger I became, the more I became immersed in creating a sanctuary for me and my family to enjoy. I started watching every gardening programme I could, listening to podcasts and following accounts on Instagram to inspire me. Finding ways to get my daughter interested in the garden has become so important to me; planting seeds with her and creating spaces for her to look after herself.

As I look back at my family, I can see that nature, nurture and necessity all come into play. There is a natural creativity that lives in both my maternal and paternal bloodline, but without nurture it lies dormant. Perhaps if it was necessity alone that led me into the garden, I may not have unearthed the passion I have found for cultivating the space. Perhaps if I had the money to pay for someone else to do it I would have, and I wouldn’t have become passionate about upcycling or growing seeds and cuttings, and finding other ways to create a haven for free. I’ve found a natural talent I didn’t know I had, and I bloody love it!

We now have a space where we can grow our own food, a nod to my maternal grandmother and her family. I’ve built walls and planters from upcycled materials, and completely relandscaped parts of the garden – perhaps a nod to my paternal grandfather. The space is slowly becoming less rectangular and more of a space for exploring, inspired by my aunt and her creativity. I believe this love I’ve found for my garden is in my blood, I just didn’t know it was there until I needed it.