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Flower gardening
In our home I look after both the vegetable garden and all but one flower garden. Jill generally looks after her ‘jumble garden’ as she calls it because she prefers an unregemented garden, where the ones I look after are regimented into rows of plants, tidy and in order. But I must admit that much of the time Jill’s garden really looks great where mine, though nice, may tend to be a bit boring.

Now why, you might ask, does a husband do the flower gardens when the wife also enjoys gardening? To answer this we must go back nearly forty four years, to the time where we hadn’t been married very long and we bought our first house off the lady we rented part of it from. Up till then the lady had looked after the gardens, but when our children were born Jill was busy enough without gardening so I became the flower gardener as well as growing the vegetables.

Ranunculars and Pansies

Since then Jill didn’t have much interest in gardening so I continued with the flower gardens. I learned about types of flowers and when to plant them, and experimented with different varieties. I bought seeds of quality varieties from commercial seed companies and grew my own plants. It was fun and I soon found that although growing vegetables was very satisfying when they were ready for harvesting, flower gardens gave a different sense of enjoyment and pleasure.

Later in my working life I became unemployed and decided to start my own nursery and grew and sold plants to retired elderly people who lived in retirement villages. This gave me work as my own boss and I got to meet people all around the city. It was rewarding and fun, and often I was asked for advice on gardening, which I gave, and it was good to go back later in the growing season and see how their gardens looked.

Old habits die hard, and though Jill enjoys her little jumble garden, I look after the three others and also plant into containers if I have too many plants.

And that’s how it happened.