BEWARE OF THE HYDRANGEAS

The sign on the garden gate read BEWARE OF THE HYDRANGEAS. My gang of street urchins could all read even if it was only the comics such as the Dandy or Beano.

 We were all about seven or eight and would have known signs like Beware of the Dog but neither I nor any of my ruffian buddies had the least idea what Hydrangeas were. They certainly sounded dangerous. It was many years before I re-encountered Hydrangeas and discovered that they were garden shrubs with very large round flower clusters in pink or blue, and that they were not hydra-headed monsters or dragons conjured up by my juvenile imagination.

It is true that private gardens had become more vulnerable to trespass since they had lost their wrought-iron gates and metal railings. These had been sacrificed to the all- out war effort. Burly men with acetylene torches had swept through the residential areas and without as much as a by-your-leave had stripped homes of everything iron that presumably were turned into artillery shells and bomb casings.

 I well remember in vivid colour the scarlet of Oriental Poppies in my grandmothers’ herbaceous border, despite them being smothered by an emergency stockpile of fireplace coal. I wish that I knew the name of the rose variety that she grew that in June was covered with fully double pure white highly fragrant blooms. Many lawns that I remember were thick with small white daisies that were low enough to escape the blade of the mower. I recall, when not much more than a toddler, sowing Candytuft, (Iberis) and Sweet Alyssum, (Lobularia) seeds between the stones of our ‘rockery’. Not that that I knew those names at that age and would have had no idea how important plant names would become to me some day. We had a vegetable garden to assist our domestic economy and to augment our severely restricted food rations. We grew corn one year although we called it maize. Americans apparently thought highly of ‘corn on the cob’ but I must say that we were not impressed. In summer we used our food coupons for sugar and made our own jam from the ‘brambles’ that grew wild in the countryside. Such foraging trips were high adventure in austere times.