Maybe it was always inevitable

I wasn’t quite sure whether to share this here, but I found myself thinking again this week about some old family photos I came across last summer. Looking at them now, it feels fairly obvious that my love of gardening and flowers did not appear from nowhere.

One of the pictures is of my great-grandmother standing outside her cottage surrounded by flowers, and I keep coming back to it. I do not remember the flowers themselves from those childhood visits, but I do remember vague snippets of summer, bees, and being given jars of honey and pieces of fresh honeycomb. Looking at the photo now, I can see how much she must have loved growing things.

I also found pictures of my grandmother, who turned the little plot outside her ground floor flat into a kitchen garden. That is about as much as I can remember, which feels slightly tragic really, because as a child and teenager I thought gardening was possibly the dullest thing in the world 😄 If only I had paid a little more attention.

There was also an old note from my great-grandmother tucked in with the photographs, written in Danish, and something about all of it stopped me in my tracks a bit. Those sorts of things make you realise that gardens are not only about what you are growing now. Sometimes they are tied up with family stories, habits, places and people you did not properly appreciate at the time.

So maybe it was always inevitable that I would end up here, talking about dahlias, obsessing over seed sowing and filling the garden with flowers whenever I can. I may have arrived at it a little late, but I am very glad it found me in the end ❤️