It’s all about plants!

A newly homed tomato plant

I know that lots of plants trigger memories, we’ve all seen that in multiple episodes of Our Plant Stories. However for me there is one standout trigger which is the strong smell of tomato plants, when you touch their leaves. First they transport me to the small vegetable patch in our childhood garden but then to dad, who every year, brought to me in London some tomato seedlings and a grow bag. He used to say to me, “they’ve got two chances”, then looking at my small shady garden and rather chaotic work/life balance - “well perhaps less than that here!”

This week has been filled with plants. On Saturday I volunteered at the Plant Heritage fair in Highgate in London. We arrived at the venue at 7.30am only to find that the school caretaker was not in evidence and the school gates had been blocked by a couple of cars. Just at that moment the transit vans full of plants began arriving, some from nurseries nearby but others from Sussex and Suffolk, Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. Challenging!

However the caretaker was located and the car owners woken and suddenly the playground gates were opened and everywhere you looked there were plants being unloaded and laid out on tables. The charity had its own table which quickly seemed to fill up with plants propagated by members. And before you knew it, it was 9am and there was a steady stream of people, armed with large plastic bags (they had been before) paying their £2.50 to browse amongst the plants.

Some had lists they told me, though often as they passed on the way out, there would have been some impulse buys! Many it seemed had been coming for years, confident they would find plants from the nurseries that you would not find in a visit to the garden centre. One lady had spied the sale from the bus and had come back to take a look. A young man told us he was a carer to his mother who has alzheimers and the garden has become an important space. There was a trio of young Italians who just came to look since they couldn’t buy, as they were going on somewhere else but we all smiled as they left clutching a small plant. Because this was a playground full of planty people, remembering the ones they had bought last year and how big they had grown, comparing notes on the merits of different cultivars, struggling to chose between two and then buying both.

I bought come courgettes and cucumbers for the Museum of Homelessness garden. We have planted some seeds but it just felt as though our empty veg beds needed to come to life and here were some small but established plants. They were supplemented by some homeless tomato plants which had been left in the plant creche. On Tuesday I took my little haul to the MOH garden. We had such a fun time planting them out, one volunteer from Azerbaijan has grown cucumbers before, the rest of us have not, so we turn to him as the expert!

And then as I am standing clutching one of the last tomato plants, an elderly woman appears, slightly bent over, she seems quiet, fragile. Someone from a support group has brought her to see the garden, I tune into snippets of conversation mentioning grief counselling. Looking at the plant in my hand, she tells me her mother used to grow tomatoes. I ask her if she would like to touch it and she reaches out and touches the leaves. As soon as the smell reaches her, I see tears well up. She tells me she lost her mother and her husband. I tell her I lost my dad and the smell reminds me of him. I ask her if she would like to plant the tomato and she knees down beside me and together we prepare the soil and as she releases the plant from its pot, I can see she has done this before.

This week I have been editing the episode I recorded in Kew Gardens. Jerry lost his mum and his home and the memory that he had once been a gardener. But nature can be gentle; it can stir memories, it can restore hope. I hope she comes back - we have more things to put in the soil.

Have a lovely weekend

Sally

x