by Suzy Watts

Created on: February 20, 2011   Last Updated: February 25, 2011

Memoirs:  My Funniest Gardening Experience

The day began slowly, as did most Sundays in those times, when I was just a nipper.  At the weekends, when my parents were home from work, they tackled the little jobs that needed doing around the house and garden. 

We gardened as a family, though I am not sure how helpful my brother and I were.  We liked to dig things up rather than help with the planting.  Weeding was our favourite game, but occasionally, our weeding went awry.

This fateful day, I was using my little rake and trowel to dig up a large weed with jaggy spikes on the stem.  I had often been scratched by this plant as I played in the garden, and now I was about to solve that problem.  I put all the weeds that I had dug up into my little wheelbarrow, and took them over to the compost heap at the bottom of the garden.  I emptied my barrow onto the pile and went off to collect some more.  After two more trips to the compost heap, I was very tired and went inside to lie down and have a little nap.

I was woken by my mother weeping and wailing outside, so I went to investigate.  My parents were standing looking at the spot where the big jaggy stemmed plant had been, and I wondered why they seemed so upset.  Questions were asked, and I proudly claimed responsibility for the good deed I had done by removing it, and explained that I had taken out the nasty weed so it would not stab me anymore.

When everyone had calmed down, my dad took me aside and explained that the weed was not a weed, but a very rare plant that had been a present from my mother's grandmother many years earlier.  The plant was now a protected species, whatever that meant, and therefore could not be replaced.  Needless to say, I was not the most popular member of the family, but the following week, dad bought a fancy replacement plant for mum, and the old plant was never mentioned again.  It never stabbed me again, so all was rosy in the garden once more.

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