PLANTING MEMORIES

Many of the plants in Nigel Slater's garden hold deeper meaning - some joyful, others more poignant - but all add another layer of pleasure when they bloom

- Nigel Slater

My friend Adrian once arrived at my door with pots of bluebells, a gift of bulbs dug from his garden. “I’m afraid there might be a few ‘strays’ in there too; I couldn’t separate them,” he said, handing me three rammed pots of Hyacinthoides non-scripta, the native English variety, with sky-blue bells hanging elegantly to one side of the stem.

Adrian was the person who rescued me when I arrived in London in my early twenties, something of a lost soul. I stayed in his spare room until I could find a place of my own, and he remained one of my dearest friends. I became rather fond of his old-fashioned garden with its rose arbour, pots of agapanthus and tubs of houseleeks. In spring, the bluebells ran amok at the bottom of his garden and reminded me of my childhood home with its hazel coppice and bluebell wood.

In the 25 years since they were planted, his generous gift of blue flowers has slowly vanished, but the ‘strays’ that arrived among the bulbs have thrived to the point of frustration. Tucked away in his pots, I would later discover, were seedlings of bright-yellow Welsh poppies, Papaver cambricum, whose delicate, paper-thin petals are charming in the right place – but my garden is not that place. Their fragile canary-yellow flowers come up in profusion each spring, looking oddly out of place among the green-and-white woodland-style planting. They spread like wildfire.