Six questions on gardening: Jean Danford

Earliest memories of gardening:

Growing up in the town centre of Rotherham in the fifties, we didn’t have a garden. Nobody around us did. There were no window boxes or tubs of flowers in the streets around me. My dad had an allotment and went there on his bike and came home with vegetables that he’d grown.

The first garden that I remember was my Aunty Mary’s. When I was five or six I remember digging in the soil there. I loved digging and just wanted the soil to look “nice”. When I was fourteen we moved to a house with a garden.

Dad grew the seeds and I voluntarily pruned, mowed and clipped hedges because I loved doing it. There were gardening books that showed me how to do this. I loved it and I loved flowers as I still do now.

Why start?

If you have a garden, I feel that there is a responsibility to Nature to care for the wildlife. I also wanted a space for the children to play. And I wanted it to be beautiful. I guess that I particularly wanted them to have the pleasure of a garden because I’d not had one. I grew vegetables because I wanted to be able to provide for ourselves. I was also interested in growing plants for their healing qualities.

Why do you keep gardening?

I like being outside. I love working with the soil, harrowing, adding compost to our heavy clay beds to make it friable. I still seem to like making the soil “Nice”! I love plants because they are amazing. The colours and shapes from such tiny seeds. The satisfaction of seeing the plants come up, especially when I’d forgotten what was there. The whole process is a pleasure that still outweighs the challenge of having painful back problems and tiredness.

How long have you been gardening?

If I count from when we got our own garden it’s about sixty years. In the middle of my life I lived in a gardenless flat for a few years but had a small balcony off the kitchen. It seems that I was compelled to grow things and crammed in as many tubs of flowers and growbags of vegetables that I could. A chair was also squeezed in so that I could sit with my plants.

What do you love and what do you dislike?

The green house is my favourite place because I can control it! No slugs yet and no rabbits. When it’s windy and cold I can still be growing things cosily inside. Sweeping all the bits up and making a clear and peaceful space in quite a Zen way.

What I dislike most is finding Crocuses or something that I’ve specially nurtured has been decimated by pigeons, muntjac or slugs. The red mist comes down and I’m angry because I’ve put the effort into something I was looking forward to seeing develop and now it’s just gone.

Has your attitude changed?

Over time I’ve had to let go of some of the preciousness of the plants when I have some gardening help and it’s not done in the way that I would do it. I’ve become ruthless in a way that I didn’t use to be. “You’re not thriving, sorry but your time is up.” It’s a trust that things will do what they do, including dying, and that’s okay.