Country Life Trending: Garden designer Noel Kingsbury on the joy of a good bonfire. One of my childhood memories of being with my dad in the garden was bonfires. Back in the 1960s, this was how everyone got rid of garden ‘rubbish’. Hardly anyone had a compost heap and the council certainly did not do a green-waste collection. If you could not burn it, the only thing to do was to drive into the woods and dump it by the side of the road. My father never did that, although we would often go into the woods to dig up leafmould to create nice humusy soil for his choicer plants. These were the days, too, when tree surgeons did not have noisy chipping machines, but piled all the debris into a big heap and lit a fire. Gardeners and council workmen, too, in sweeping up leaves in the autumn would pile them into great heaps and burn them, fumigating entire neighbourhoods.