Rose

This rose is an old friend.. we go back a long way! I was only a child when I planted the seed. It was one of those little kits you can get, you know a cardboard box with a pretty picture on the outside and inside is a plant pot, a seed and a little plastic bag of compost. I remember doing it! I can picture it now, in the back garden of the house where I grew up. I guess I must have watered it and it must have germinated and started to grow - I don't remember more than that.

It was left to its own devices. It must have just steadily got on with it. Years passed. Its existence was entirely forgotten by me. I left home. I moved about. Unbeknown to me, it had a custodian - my Dad. He didn't water it, he didn't check to see if it needed anything. But he didn't throw it away. And when my parents moved house, leaving London for Norwich, he must have taken it with them. Because when I was in my 30s, he said to me one day something along the lines of 'I've still got that grotty old rose of yours' (or words to that effect!). 'What old rose - you can't possibly mean that little shrub rose I tried to grow as a child?'

And it turns out that Dad had just parked it down the side of his shed and it just kept quietly growing. He brought it for me when I moved into the flat in Tottenham with my partner (now my husband). And so it passed to a new custodian, for my partner made and cherished a beautiful garden-against-the-odds outside the flat down the side of an unpromising alley and carpark. And he asked if he could put it into the ground. I said, well I think it really deserves it - I can't believe that its survived all this time in a pot! So after several decades of hanging on, the rose finally got its feet into the earth. And it was loved and tended and watered .. and for the very first time ever, it flowered. It survived the Tottenham carpark and thrived.

When we moved to Essex two years back now, we brought it with us and now I have it in my garden. Its very happy here and it has such a special significance for me.

It links me with my childhood self, with my childhood home, with my Dad who kept it for my sake, with my husband who nurtured it and got it to flower for me.. and planting it in the garden here makes me feel loved and somehow 'rooted' in my new home. Like something has turned full circle .. we were both seedlings together and thanks to the support of important people along the way, we are now in full bloom (or something like that!).