When I was 15, I left home, and went to live in London during the "swinging sixties"
I ended up in a bedsit, without even a window box.
I didn't realise, that I missed the family garden, until one morning outside Tottenham Court Road tube station. On the newsagent's stand there was a copy of Amateur Gardening, with a photograph on the front cover of the most beautiful garden I had ever seen.
I bought it straight away.
After that, I would buy every gardening magazine I could find. I used to read them from cover to cover, whilst eating my dinner in the local Golden Egg or Wimpy Bar, before going back to my bedsit.
The only garden that I knew of, was Kew Gardens, so I used to pay my threepenny bit and spend hours there every Sunday.
Then someone gave me The Manual of Shrub Roses by Graham Thomas. It was just a little booklet from Sunningdale Nurseries where he worked.
Graham Thomas had such a way of describing the roses, that even though I had never seen them, I knew them intimately. I could smell their perfume and feel the silkiness of their petals.
I have that booklet still.
It was some years before I had my own garden and it was tiny. But it backed on to the main London to Brighton railway line and the embankment was very wide at that point, so, I commandeered it.
That railway embankment became my own little paradise. I would be out there all day until it was too dark to see.
I would go and visit gardens and I used to haunt Will Ingwerson's alpine nursery.
Many years later, I moved to Cornwall and at last had a large garden. It was beautiful. I still have pangs when I think of it. But the damp climate of Cornwall was making my asthma a lot worse and I realised that I spent more time, sitting inside, looking out of the window waiting for the rain to stop, than I did being out in the garden!
So I moved to Crete and now have a tiny garden again. But I am older now, and cannot spend all day working in it any more. But I can sit in it and plan it and I am finding it so exciting to learn a new way of gardening.
Daisy