Reading:
Green Fingers My mother had green fingers. Everything she planted shot up straight and tall. A country girl, she learned those almost mystic arts A hundred years and more ago, a child in her parents’ garden. Their influence still lingers. In those then isolated rural parts Growing food for the family meant survival. When I was little we came to live in a smoky city, Our garden far too small for proper planting. So first she set that soft green hedge of runner beans That stopped our nosey neighbours from looking To see who was going to the outside lavatory. My job was stringing tough shells ready for cooking. In that sooty London soil tomatoes flourished Like you never saw. They ripened on our scullery Window sill, aroma from their vines filling the air. No space for rows of flowers but in summer there were Nasturtiums rampant, a tangled scarlet-orange overlay So thick our wartime Anderson shelter vanished. When I’d grown up and moved away to university She went back to the town where she was born To make a garden like the one she knew in childhood, Not a designed affair but functional: small lawn By the back door, flowers next, vegetables beyond, fruit trees At the far end. Its beauty lay in homeliness and in simplicity. She grew things for her pleasure, that was all, Far too much for her modest needs. She left her surplus on the garden wall For any passers-by to take for free. She often won a prize in the annual show. ‘Nothing special, I just plucked a Cox’s off the tree.’ We buried her ashes under that apple tree Me filled with stinging sense of loss and guilt. Why had I not helped her more? Work was no excuse. She’d been there for me from infancy. In fantasy I see her in her garden, bent To remove some wilt or plant no longer any use. Her shade will rise in spring invisible between each row. Green-fingered benevolence to make her garden thrive Whatever those who may come after choose to grow. But nothing will out-class those harvests when she was alive. Her apple tree will live on too, bringing fruit and shade, Long after me whom nine decades ago she made.
Peter Lloyd Jones 