Last week I was drowning under packets and packets of seeds of all colours, and hoping that I could keep the seed bill down a bit this year. So what did I do when I’d finished writing my blog? I went out and bought more seeds!

This time though they weren’t for me, but for the twenty-one six year olds who attended my daughter’s birthday party. Each one went home clutching a little cellophane bag full of sweets with a ladybird printed on the front and a bright, eye catching packet of seeds poking out of the top. This was probably the first party they had been to where their ‘loot’ included a seed tray and a plastic bag of compost! In return, from one friend, my daughter received a child sized Dutch hoe and a tiny canvas bag containing a trowel, fork and rake. Someone knows her well.

That’s what happens when you go party shopping after a morning of Master Gardening. I stood in front of the seed stand in Wilcos, and was transported back to the little patch of ground my mother gave to me when I was my daughter’s age. My father had converted the pigsty at the bottom of the garden into a little playhouse, complete with dormer window. My little garden sat next to the tiny brick-paved pig yard where we made mud pies and witches’ potions. In it I grew the usual children’s lettuces and radishes, which I pulled up and ate, straight from the ground. These were accompanied by sticks of rhubarb whose raw and ragged ends my sisters and I dabbed in bowls of sugar and chewed on greedily.

This is where I learned to distinguish between ‘plants’ and ‘weeds’ although, as a child my definitions probably didn’t quite match those of my mother. A weed is just a plant in the wrong place, and I loved the tiny fluorescent green umbrellas of spurge. I would snap the stalks to squeeze out the milky sap into unspeakable pots of ‘potion’, which were left around to poison any invading witches. Now I know that this is an irritant and to be avoided but then I would have seen this as a highly satisfactory quality for a potion ingredient.

I have grown so many things over the years that my memories of what else that patch of earth produced are hazy. Nasturtiums and marigolds almost certainly figured somewhere and I think there was a lavender bush at one point. I did have a beautiful red double daisy for a while. One memorable year my mother begged a corner for a marrow plant. We both learned that marrows are not shy plants, content to sit in a corner, but big bullies who elbow all their neighbours out of the way and sprawl across the entire bed.

Nowadays my tiny garden is just another part of the lawn, although my children, and their cousins, still use the playhouse. Every time I walk across it to reach the grown up veg beds that I have taken over for my mother, I remember those happy days. I hope that those twenty-one little packets will spark something in their new owners and that this winter I have sown the seeds of some new little gardeners.