Who got you into gardening?

[MereDintofPandiculation]

Who inspired you to start gardening?

For me, definitely my mother. She gave me a small plot (which I completely failed to maintain), allowed me to choose a couple of roses to add to her collection (goldilocks and Masquerade), and gave me a bowl of cacti and succulents for my bedroom. By teenage years, I knew most of-the plants in the garden, helped her prune the roses and joined with her in entering plants and winning prizes at the cactus and succulent show in the city. It sometimes shocks me how many plants I recommend to others are ones I learned from her.

She also taught me the names of all the flowers in the lawn (a complete assemblage of hay meadow species) and began my other interest, in our wild flowers.

I started this tread because moe than one poster has referred to the influence of their mother in their liking for gardening, so I was wondering how important parental influence was.

My parents didn't garden - they had no interest. I had no interest but I moved to a new house and the decking was rotting so the patio needed to be redone - I wanted to see if I could fix a few things in the garden that I hated.

I really hadn't seen any gardens that appealed to me - most looked too old-fashioned or too over-designed, I'd watch gardening makeover programs, hoping to be inspired but I thought the gardens they created looked dull. I bought magazines trying to et inspired.

Then someone showed me a picture of a garden and I really liked it, I couldn't stop thinking about it - I booked a consultation with the designer - she spent a few hours with me, in my garden, talking through ideas and I started to understand how to create a garden design and my confidence grew, I've done most of the work myself, my garden isn't finished yet about 75% of the way there but I love it - couldn't have done it without the designer's input - she set me on course, helped me think differently, to understand how to create the garden I wanted - that's what drew me in.

My dad. He was a really keen gardener, and had a greenhouse, vegetable patch, the lot. By the time I was about 5 I was helping him in the greenhouse planting seeds and pricking out seedlings, and going round the garden in summer dead-heading French marigolds. We also had a pond, and he bred goldfish in it. We used to catch the tiny fry and have them in a tank in the house, otherwise they tended to get eaten by the big ones. To start with they aren't golden, they are greeny-brown, and it was lovely to watch them getting bigger and changing colour, and some had black & white splodges on them too. We had a separate tank for frogspawn as well.

@MereDintofPandiculation at the risk of repeating my story from several other threads... but seeing as you asked, I was inspired by my paternal grandmother and spookily enough I was only just thinking about her today, as I so often do when I'm out in the garden.

Granny (like your mother) gave me a small square of border in her garden - I immediately took to it, planting marigolds, California Poppies (which I loved because they went to sleep at night) and pansies, keeping it tidy, going out with my plastic watering can every week. I also helped her to prune the roses and my fondest memory is of her beautiful peony which flowered in time for my birthday in May.

She used to send me off with the kitchen scissors to cut fresh mint to make mint sauce, whcpich also ignited my love of growing herbs to add to recipes. There is nothing quite like the pungent smell of rosemary, marjoram and thyme and it takes me right back to summers at Granny's in the school holidays.

No one. My parents weren’t that interested.

We bought DHs grandparents house and they were big gardeners in their day. Sadly it had gone to rack and ruin as they aged so it needed a lot of TLC to get it back into shape. When I realised how much gardeners cost, and that I was sitting bored breastfeeding in a house full of gardening books, I started reading.

I went literally from knowing zero to knowing Latin genus, soil conditions, propagation techniques etc in 6 months. I read and read and then spent another few years working out what would work in our dry sun baked chalky soil.

20 years later, the garden looks decent and I know what I’m doing!

Dad - my mother didn't do any gardening at all. I had a very large pot which was my 'garden' - mostly populated by digging bulbs etc from the borders iirc. I helped him a bit - I'm not sure I did much but I suppose I took some notice of what he was doing and what plants we had.

Then when DH and I bought our house - new build with just a lawn and bare borders - it was Gardeners Question Time on R4 and particularly Geoff Hamilton on Gardeners World. It was such a shock when he suddenly died.

@Linglong that’s interesting!

@Yamadori you started younger than I did! The last time we had frogspawn in a tank, we had an explosion of damselflies, dozens of them clinging to the power cables to shed their last insect body and spread their wings. Then we had to catch them …

@daisychain01 I remember picking peas and beans. They always reckon being able to eat what you’ve grown is good for raising interest.

@Saveitnotforme Wow - that really is speedy!

@ErrolTheDragon so another dad. I think it was granddad who taught my mum.

So so far we have

mother …………..….1
father ………………2
grandmother ……….1
acquiring a garden …1
seeing a garden ….. 1

Genetics I reckon. I mean, I remember as a toddler trailing my grandfather round his good and productive garden, and having plants pointed out to me and so on, but I can't remember a time when it didn't make perfect sense or seem natural.
Then a ten year break of university, living in London, having babies etc, but when I moved on from that, and started again it seemed so easy and natural.

It sounds conceited but I seem to know things without consciously learning them. I'm always happy to learn too, and will carry on doing that for the rest of my life but there's an instinctive element for which I have no explanation. I come from a long line of gardeners and amateur botanists, so I'm convinced genetics plays a part.

And if I can add balance - dh hates gardening and he blames it on being dragged to the allotment by his dad every Sunday - his dad was trying to encourage his interest. He enjoys looking at the garden I have redesigned but he doesn't want to get involved (although he's fond of the tree ferns) and he's slightly concerned I'm going to drag him into gardening like his father did.

Dad and Grandad. As a youngster I spent a lot of time hanging out in the garden with my Dad, mainly growing fruit and vegetables. I lost interest as a teenager but a lot of what I learnt came in useful when I had my own garden. My Grandad worked as a gardener until he was 85 and would take me out with him when I was a teen (had no choice!) learnt so much from him about pruning, building sheds and maintaining tools. More recently my Aunt is my gardening mentor. She is mid eighties and is still building flint raised beds in her garden. We email each other photos of our progress and I have picked up some good tips from her. I spent a lot of time gardening with my son (now a grumpy teen) when he was young and he learnt a lot and always buys me an actual plant rather than flowers for birthdays etc. He is useful for muscle work now and still loves our pond. Hopefully passed a love of gardening down another generation.

My mum. I didn't realise how important plants were to me until I left home and realised that something was missing from my life.

It sounds conceited but I seem to know things without consciously learning them. I'm always happy to learn too, and will carry on doing that for the rest of my life but there's an instinctive element for which I have no explanation. I come from a long line of gardeners and amateur botanists, so I'm convinced genetics plays a part. Genetics or culture? Conversation around you as a small child will give a lot of knowledge. My mother’s family had a heritage of market gardening, and so it was natural for her to name the wild flowers for me, to notice what was growing. I watched the annual cycle from seed to harvest. Many people don’t seem to notice flowers, certainly don’t see any differences between them apart from colour, don’t understand trees (non-conifers) have flowers, that if your bush has berries it must have had flowers. Learning about gardening is a whole lot more difficult from that base-line.

So so far we have
mother …………..….2
father ………………3
grandmother ……….1
grandfather ………. 1
acquiring a garden …1
seeing a garden ….. 1
Genetics ………… 1

I went shopping with my adult daughter the other day. She never showed all that much interest in gardening when she lived at home, and she now lives in a flat with her partner. Every windowsill is filled with houseplants.😂

While we were out, she made me take her all round a garden centre looking at the plants so she can decide what to plant in her future garden when she eventually has a house with one.

My parents gardened (is that the word for it?) and I remember them growing potatoes and some other veggies.
Before that, it was my granddad (dads side). I used to follow him all over the place when he was gardening and he had such an amazing vegetable garden. My nanny didn't do as much, the kitchen was her domain, but she had a border full of mint, another with house leeks (the succulents that spread) and I think she gave me some of the babies to grow at home, and irises and lily of the valley.
My other grandparents grew veg too, but I don't remember doing as much with them. I do remember their potato storage hut and they had the most amazing Victoria plum tree. They also used the front garden to grow veg, mainly onions. I didn't know anyone else who did that.
I wasn't really fussed in my late teen/early twenties about the garden. I'd mow the grass begrudgingly and fight with the weeds occasionally. I think it was that having to do certain things and then liking what it looked like afterwards, and then would be given plants and would look up plants. But also talking to my mum when I'd go to visit and we'd walk about her garden and talk about various plants.
I loved watching Percy Thrower on Blue Peter in their little garden.

So for me, the seed was planted at a very early age, but it took a while to germinate. I would never be without a garden now.

My dad. He always grew veg (in the 80s it was vital as there was a period his job didn't pay them for 18 months), and he liked doing it too.

When we moved to a house with a larger garden, he gave all of us a plot (about 3'x6' in reality) and a few of us used them while others couldn't be bothered (6 DCs). But I learned with him helping me there and I used to help him with the main parts, especially watering and side stemming tomatoes, and helping harvest. And heavy digging as I got older. Potting on seedlings, the importance of labelling, washing out the yoghurt pots for seedling pots,....

My first house was a back garden of very thin layer of topsoil on builders rubble, so nothing grew, but we moved and I also got an allotment (used it for 5 years until life interfered but still use the garden) and grow lots of my own veg and some fruit. and even now I only have a balcony, I still had a fair bit this year, last few tomatoes still coming.