So much of my garden is about memory, about different people, places, and times. It’s part of my becoming rooted here – new offshoots from the past that I carry with me.
First in pride of place. this apple Annie-Elisabeth is for my aunt, from whom I inherited the money to afford this house, and for my mother, from whose garden many of the plants here came. It’s also a memory of my grandparents’ garden in Windsor Great Park, where Annie-Elisabeth was one of the elderly apple trees that dotted the lawn on which we played our own version of croquet.
I’m very fond of cyclamen hederifolium – my grandparents lawn had a very large colony of them, spreading out from a dry flowerbed under the towering fir tree. I took some corms from them to my London flat in the mid-1980s, and thence to my first house in Worcester, and now on to my current place, where they’re very slowly spreading.
Iris siberica are an absolute delight! My Mum has large clumps of them, and I took a few many years ago. They were glorious under the peach tree in my garden in London, and seem to enjoy my present garden a lot. For me, they’re one of the harbingers of summer, and beloved partly because of that … difficult to photograph, though, as there’s something about that shade of blue that digital cameras find hard to capture.
My brother had a retirement project of becoming the holder of the National Collection of Erysimums. One of the lovely plants he acquired was erysimum mutabile – the changeable wallflower – of which he gave me a cutting. Subsequent cuttings moved with me from London to my first house in Worcester, and a further cutting to my present house, where this is the second succession (they only live a few years)
OK, houseplant not garden plant! My brother sent me a dendrobium as a house-warming gift in 2011when I moved from London to Worceser. There have been a number of baby keiki, and this one was a couple of years old and blooming for the first time. Several others are scattered around the house!