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I am now a Gardener
Growing up, neither of my parents showed much interest in gardening, plants or even nature in general
Well, my dad used to like looking at the birds in his garden and would identify them, but that’s about it. My mum likes to sit in the sun on her terrace with her morning coffee. But the grass in her little garden is so ridiculously long, that when her cat caught a seagull a couple of years ago, we didn’t even know it was there, all huge and dead in the middle of the grass until one of us tried to walk to the other side of the garden. That bird was bigger than the cat! And very, very dead.
Needless to say, I haven’t had the most green-fingered upbringing. We didn’t even have many indoor plants that survived, most likely through neglect and lack of watering. Same with the garden. Cutting the grass was pretty much all that was achieved when I was a kid and I had no idea what any plants were called or even how to grow anything.
Then one person changed my mind about what can be done, although it has taken many, many years: my mother-in-law (MIL). When I first met my husband 29 years ago (yikes!), he took me to meet his parents at their amazing house in Northumberland, the North of England. They had about 2.5 acres of land on a site of a disused factory that made bricks for the local industry —…
