By Heather Allen
Forget-me-nots have colonised my garden. Every spring, they open their cheeky blue eyes in plant pots and along the borders, standing defiantly against the relentless march of bluebells across the garden.
These tiny, cheerful flowers have decorated the verges and borders of my life since I can remember. I cannot think of a spring garden without picturing a scattering of blue and yellow flowers filling a border, or poking through a crack, or taking up residence in another plant’s pot.
I loved gardening as a child, helping my mother at home and my grandfather in his allotment, but it was many years after leaving home that I took up my trowel again. Early one March, when I was feeling low, a friend suggested I do some gardening. “When you put your hands in the earth it grounds you,” she said, her bangles chiming as she mimed the action. I watched her hands, mesmerised by the bangles, then looked up into her eyes. She smiled. “Just give it a go.”
I thought about it. My mum had always seemed at her calmest when gardening. Trowel in hand, humming to herself, her blue eyes smiled at me as I grubbed in the ground next to her. I remember the deep peace I felt, kneeling next to her, watching her sun-browned hands working in the clay. Our garden in the spring: flowering currant blossoms dancing on their delicate stalks; primroses clustering, pale and fresh on the red-brown earth, and lilac blossoms filling the air with their sweet scent.
Then I thought about Saturdays, when we would visit my grandparents. In spring and summer, I would skip along next to grandad’s wheelbarrow as we trundled to the allotments at the end of the street. I loved to help him, chattering and laughing as he tended his marrows and beans, and marvelling at the towering canes of sweet peas. I remember the forget-me-nots then, those tiny blue flowers in spring, peeking out of the allotment verges, lining the borders of grandad’s bungalow garden. Always forget-me-nots, everywhere, beautiful and bright. I decided.
Soon after my friend’s speech, on a visit to Mom, I asked her, could I have a few seedlings? She beamed. “You’re welcome to them! They self-seed you know! And they’ll spread, so watch it!”
I took them home, planted them in pots, and watched as they bloomed, turning their tiny faces to the spring sun. I felt grounded, it was true. Let them spread. Bring it on.
From that point on, I began to spend more time in the garden of my rented property, transforming it over the next few years from a minimal-maintenance garden to a floral delight. When we moved, once again in spring, I took several forget-me-not seedlings with me in pots.
Now, over ten years since my mother passed on, the garden in the family home still contains many of the plants she loved and cared for. It gives me a strange feeling, now, to see forget-me-nots coming up every year, here at my home and in my mother’s former garden, the many-times-great grandchildren of the flowers she grew.
When I look at them now, they are tiny beacons guiding me into memories of spring days running bare-legged through the garden, gathering handfuls of the tiny blue blooms. My mother would smile as my father caught me, swept me up and hugged me, saying: “You’ll forget me not, will you, my girl?”