Forget Me Not

I have just had a new greenhouse installed. It is a beautiful reproduction Victorian extravaganza, my dream greenhouse with low brick walls and magical vents that open in the heat and louvred panels and a long potting bench at which I will be a green-fingered wizard.

It is a world away from its predecessor, a small, utilitarian, aluminium affair with a door that kept dropping off its runner.

I bought my glass palace with money my dad left me.

I wanted something solid and magnificent and, yes, a little frivolous to remember him by.

I have two wicker chairs in there, resting on flattened cardboard boxes until I put down a more permanent floor. They used to be in his sun lounge.

And I’m waiting impatiently for delivery of two 'Ferdinand Pichard' roses that I will plant either side of the door. Roses that dad had in his garden, stripes of pale and magenta pink on gloriously blowsy, fragrant flowers. I just have to try not to catch myself on their evil little thorns every time I pass.

Now, as I sit here wrapped up against the foggy morning, looking at the leaves that are already attaching themselves to the damp on the roof of my pristine greenhouse, I recognise that I don’t need this beautiful building to remember Dad.

I think of his obsession with keeping his drive clear every time I pick up a windfallen apple.

I think of him and smile whenever I see a garden gnome and his long-running gag of placing a diminutive chap on his friend’s doorstep for him to find in the morning. He even took a gnome to leave outside his tent when they went on a group camping trip.

I think of him every time I stand over the green bin chopping branches too big for the compost into small lengths. When I was much younger, I questioned him on spending time doing what seemed to me a pointless task. Well, you can fit more in, he replied. I snorted, safe in my youthful superiority.

Now I stand over the bin and chop and chop and chop. It’s a job I relish, yes my hands hurt from the secateurs, but at least I’m not digging and buggering up my back. It is methodical, meditative even, and do you know what, you can fit loads more in the bin.

Forget me not. How could I, Dad? How could I?