One of my earliest memories of my father revolves around his garden in the rear yard of the house we moved to in 1949 in Hunter Street in Hornsby. Our house fronted Hunter Street, and reared Albert Lane. All of this, sadly, is now part of a Westfield complex. Dad's garage come workshop fronted Albert Lane. Between the workshop and the house was Dad's garden, on the southern fence. The dug plots for veggies are but a blur, the real attraction was the massive trellis Dad constructed along the fence to enable him to grow Sweetpeas facing the northern sun. He always grew from seed but, as luck would have it, one of the ways he turned a buck immediately post-war, was to crank out seedling boxes that he flogged door to door on his fruit'n'veg round through the leafy streets of Wahroonga and Turramurra. He, of course, started his Sweetpea seedlings in one of these boxes. The seeds were planted religiously every 17th March, St Patrick's Day, not that Dad was either Irish or religious, he just needed a method to hang his date-remembering neurones on. I do not recall him growing Sweetpeas on the farm at Denman, but he did grow them through all his years with Peggy, his second wife.
I am growing a trial patch of Sweetpea along a plastic trellis, and two trial pots of Sweetpea Bijou, to see if the Sweetpea-gene has crossed to my generation. Dad passed on in May 2011, one month shy of 90 years. |
