by Gillian Taber

Created on: August 29, 2011   Last Updated: September 12, 2011

Smells are triggers, I find. Garden smells are the strongest memory bullets. Hit me with lavender and I'm walking up my Grandad's front path, brushing against those fragrantly flowering bushes. Bluebells take me to a wood in Hampshire and arm-loads of delicate purple-blue 'fairy hats' weighing heavily in my pre-teen arms. But mint, oh yes, mint; that sends me straight into Grandad's back garden.

Like most men of his generation, Grandad was in the army. I don't really remember him very well, I was no more than six when he died, but I remember two things with absolute clarity. The story of his horse, Spider, who stood on Grandad's foot and broke his toe whilst he was in the army, and Grandad in the garden. Weren't all male grandparents gardeners, if we are of 'a certain age'? I know it was common for us to talk about 'Grandad's veg patch' or 'Grandad's allotment', when I was at school. They were usually found in the garden, up to their elbows in mulch, strong arms turning over the potato patch or delicately pricking out tiny seedlings grown in a makeshift greenhouse of 'liberated' glass and wood, in upturned egg cartons.

To return to mint, let me transport you back forty years, to a long, narrow strip of land behind Grandad's Victorian style house, and his ground floor flat. Nana is in the galley kitchen, probably making something with dumplings in it – I swear no other human being ever made dumplings as good as my Nana – and Grandad is out in the garden, probably trying to avoid the organised chaos in the kitchen! A single door leads out of the back room, our playroom, and dumps you next to the coal bin, upon which is perched Timothy, the tubby tabby cat, well known for singeing his tail in the fire, wanting to go out when Z-Cars was on telly and his unexplained monica of Timothy Tightstream!

Straight ahead is a little pedestal, painted chalky white and supporting a huge, powder blue pot, overflowing with red geraniums. Around the base of the pedestal is a flower bed, edged with white-painted pebbles. White alyssum and mauve-blue lobelia spill over the pebbles and more geraniums surround the pedestal base with colour. Dodge to the left and you can begin to walk down the lawn, mown into perfect, alternating stripes and trimmed with regimented precision at the edges of the beds which run the length of the garden on both sides.

Roses come first. Red, yellow and soft orange in the right bed, but my favourite adorned the left bed. Blue Moon. I could,

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