The garden of youth

I recently passed my childhood home, took the opportunity to park up for a few minutes and furtively look in from the car. My mother died twenty six years ago and we sold the house a couple of years after that and I have always found it painful to go back.

The house itself has fallen into obvious disrepair. Peeling paint, dirty windows, dripping gutters. But it was the state of the garden that hurt most. The neat borders and tidy hedges my parents lovingly planted and tended for years have overgrown, gone wild left to their own devices. The boundary wall and path my father built are still there but are shabby and unkempt.

The view up the garden was limited but my mind wandered up the weed clogged path and encroaching shrubbery, a choked artery close to death. Plants had become shrubs, shrubs become trees, grass had invaded the chocolate cake beds. Diligently pruned bushes had become overblown in a tangle of neglect and now provided ample camouflage for hidden memories.

Once secret dens are now thick with knotweed and couch grass where no child has trampled for decades. Exuberant growth has blurred the edges with fertile detail. Lovingly crazed paving burst colourfully with painterly lichen and slippery pillows of moss. Deep drifts of annual leaves piled layer upon layer, covered earth, then became earth, over and over again. Human order defeated by…