Six questions on gardening: Sheila Simmons

What is your earliest memory of yourself or some other person gardening?

My earliest memory of gardening was of my father growing sweet peas. We lived in a small terraced house in inner city Birmingham and our side of the street had narrow gardens divided by privet hedges. There was a lawn with a path and flower border on one side. At the end of the lawn was the sweet pea bed. Beyond that I can’t remember clearly except for rhubarb and gooseberries. My father grew his sweet peas as if for exhibition, digging a trench and filling it with manure, compost and a topping of soil. Manure was plentiful because milk was delivered by horse and cart so many of the residents would go out with buckets and shovels to collect what they could for their manure heaps.

My father would put up a structure of canes in a V shape, as I do each year for my climbing beans. As the sweet peas grew he tended them carefully, tying them in and removing side shoots and tendrils and any flower stems with fewer than 4 buds. I remember this because when I was old enough he allowed me to help. He would cut sweet peas for the house every day when he got home from work so the living room was always scented in those summer months. We moved out to the suburbs when I was 10 years old and my father carried on growing sweet peas there for the rest of his life. In his last few years he was unable to do the double digging for the trench but would dig a small hole filled with compost for each plant. When he died his sweet peas were still growing and I continued to cut them every few days and put them in the sitting room while I was clearing the house during the following few weeks.

Why did you start gardening?

I started gardening in my mid 20s when I moved out of London. It was the early 70s when self-sufficiency was becoming popular. My husband and I were complete novices to vegetable growing but our lack of knowledge was made up for by our enthusiasm. I remember my disappointment when I realised that each carrot plant would yield only one carrot. I had been expecting a bunch of carrots to emerge from each plant! The old man next door must have been kept amused by our efforts but he gave us good advice about what to plant when and how far apart the rows should be etc.

Eventually we moved to Malvern and bought our own house with a bigger garden than we had had before. Actually it was a field of cabbages with a daffodil border. By then there were plenty of books on organic gardening and our bible was Grow Your Own Fruit and Vegetables by Lawrence D.Hills. Although complete self-sufficiency wasn’t possible with a full-time job, growing my own food has remained a passion.

Why did you stop, or if that’s not the case, why do you keep gardening?

I haven’t stopped gardening but I have reduced the amount of ground I use for vegetables. I keep gardening because I get such delight and satisfaction from growing and harvesting my own food. Anything fresh from the garden and cooked or eaten straight away tastes so much better than food bought from a shop. I love my apple trees. We chose them carefully to span a long period of cropping, from the earliest, Discovery, to the latest, Crispin, which I don’t harvest until November and will keep well into the new year.

How long have you gardened for?

49 years

What do you love and what do you dislike about gardening?

I love having something edible in my garden every day of the year. Although trying to break up frozen ground with a pickaxe during a bad winter in order to dig up a parsnip isn’t much fun. I love being outside especially at this time of year when I can listen to birdsong while I work. I love watching the small changes in the garden: the first daffodil flower to open, the gradual greening of the hedges, the first broad bean shoots pushing their way through the earth, the appearance of the ruby jewels of redcurrants, the ripening tomatoes. I enjoy letting my thoughts flow randomly when doing repetitive tasks like digging, weeding and mowing. I love listening to radio drama and podcasts while pricking out seedlings in the greenhouse.

I dislike the unavoidable fact that my ageing body protests a lot more. My back often aches, my neck and shoulders hurt, I can no longer squat down to plant and weed because of my knees. I no longer have the stamina to work for long periods without having to have frequent breaks which means that I get less done.

I dislike having to spend time covering my four vegetable plots with netting to stop next door’s cat from shitting in them. This means hammering in posts, running support wire from each post and draping the netting over the top. I then have to anchor it down with canes and lengths of wood. In order to hoe, weed or harvest I have to get at least part of the netting off and climb over the wire. I sometimes think I spend more time keeping cats out than on actual gardening.

I dislike the perennial weeds with which my garden is cursed and which are impossible to get rid of. The worst is horsetail. So called gardening experts say that you can get rid of it eventually by various methods such as covering it with cardboard, carpet, black plastic sheeting, impermeable membrane etc.etc. Ha! After 45 years of trying every method I have never succeeded. Like John Cushnie, the garden expert from Northern Ireland who used to be on Gardeners’ Question Time, I have had to learn to live with it. Ground elder, ground ivy and creeping buttercup are other weeds I have given up trying to control.

Has your attitude to gardening changed from when you started and, if so, in what way?

My attitude to gardening has changed in some ways and not in others. When I began I had no real interest in flowers or shrubs. Then as the years went by people would give me things that I had to find room for. I also needed to reduce my workload so I changed the bed nearest to the house from vegetables to a mixture of bulbs, shrubs and perennials. There are now different kinds of narcissus, a hypericum that my father gave me, a variegated holly, bluebells, aquilegia, anemones and various other perennials whose names I have forgotten. They all grow on a carpet of ground elder which I occasionally mow when it gets too big for its boots. I enjoy the changing appearance of this patch in spite of its messiness.

I also began to think about design some years ago when Keith suggested filling in the side of my drive, which was below ground level and used to lead to an old hen house. His plan was to have it tarmacked so that there would be room for both our cars. I think he measured it wrong because there wasn’t enough space. It turned into a major project. I decided to plant clematis and a climbing rose against the stone wall that divided my plot from my neighbour’s. I also built a curved low stone wall in the corner of the drive to make a small flower bed. I even decided on a colour scheme of pale pink, white and blue shades for this whole area. Some things worked, some didn’t but I enjoyed trying things out and discovered the fun in gardening. I am fairly ruthless in removing something if it doesn’t look right even if my neighbour gave it to me. One year I grew tall multi-coloured cosmos next to the wall which often caught the attention of passers by. There is a red helianthemum which is totally wrong for the original colour scheme but it thrives and I love it, so it stays.

I have also started putting flowers in or next to the vegetable beds. Tall Japanese anemones grow next to where my courgettes will be planted this summer. A couple of years ago, after seeing a drawing of someone’s plan for a Chelsea show garden, I let some of my parsnips go to seed. They grew magnificently tall with yellow seed heads and formed a screen at the end of the plot. I left them until the winter gales started to blow them over. There are aquilegias against the shed wall and red poppies are coming up next to the broad beans. And, of course, there is always a wigwam of sweet peas somewhere. So, yes, my attitude has changed in that I am enjoying the look of the garden even though the fruit and vegetables are still my priority. There is a joy in randomness and I hope I will be able to continue for a while longer.