Val Bourne appreciates light and shade at Spring Cottage
Credit: Marianne Majerus
Talk to 100 keen gardeners and a lot of them will mention a grandparent who took the time to show them the ropes. In my case it was my paternal grandmother, a doughty Yorkshire woman named Lucy Elizabeth Hardy.
We were both larks, up at the crack of dawn, whilst the rest of the owls slept on. I loved those early, one-to-one mornings, and this Victorian knew the language of flowers and every plant’s medicinal use.
She put the alchemist into alchemilla and Aquila the eagle into the aquilegia, explaining that the nectar-rich spurs at the back of the flower were talonshaped.