I grew up in Scotland in a small village surrounded by hills and forests.
Every summer, for two weeks, I would go down to a town just outside Nottingham to stay with my grandmother and grandad.
My grandad was the craziest veggie grower you have ever met.
He had two massive glasshouses. Really long ones. At the end of each one was a huge deep well, so he always had plenty of water handy.
Outside the glasshouses he grew everything you can imagine, veggie wise. He was out in that garden nonstop, every other day.
I only ever really knew him when he was already retired. So all my memories are of him in his garden. He was always out there working away, or coming into the kitchen with the beans, and everyone sitting down at the table to shell them.
His name was Bertie.
Now Bertie had a little window on the street side of his house. He would place different vegetables he had grown on the window ledge for everyone to see. People walking past would see them and knock on his door.
“Bertie, I’m after some veggies. What can I have?”
“Well, the cucumbers are doing really good just now. And the pumpkins are great.” he would reply.
He sold his veggies through that window for a little bit of cash He didn’t make a lot. But what he really developed was a community. People genuinely loved and adored him. He was a popular man, and his garden was the reason. Veggies were the love of his life.
Here is the honest part. As a child, none of all this really interested me much. He was just my kind old grandad.
But it anchored itself in me somehow. And later on in life, it all started coming out. Not the veggie growing. (That’s just not my thing.) But that same passion, grounded in nature, directed at growing plants and seeing people out in their gardens enjoying themselves. I think that is one of the most therapeutic things a person can do.
I’ve been blessed to enjoy 35 years of designing and building gardens. And if you trace it all the way back, it really began at a little window in a house on a street outside Nottingham, with an old man and his cucumbers.
