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Suburban Gardens

ChrisM

ChrisM

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My father's pride and joy, photographed in summer 1937. Created in six years from a ploughed field.

The structures are a child's swing built like a lych gate; and my sister's Wendy House, complete with an open fireplace and home-made furniture. And everywhere poppies, roses, catmint and early Russell lupins.

Chris


unable to replace personal photos.
 
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Chester Road, Streetly. A bit outside the city boundary, strictly speaking, but near enough to qualify for the forum, I felt!

The swing has gone - the posts rotted eventually - but I believe the Wendy House survives, after more than 70 years. The air-raid shelter which followed 18 months later - a sunken reinforced concrete structure whose construction is one of my earliest memories- is definitely still there, defying all attempts to demolish it.

The open fields have long since gone, of course, all built on. One of them was offered to my father for 6d = 2.5p/sq.yd but he felt that was far too expensive.

Chris
 
Very nice photos Chris. What an undertaking. It must have been a lot of very hard work but such an amazing result. Thanks for posting.
 
ChrisM,
Lovely photos of a super garden. My dad's best friend lived on the Chester Road next to Puddepha's shop on the corner of Bridle Lane. He did a good job with his garden too, and from it you could see the stand at Barr Beacon. Sometimes we would walk there and back - about 30 minutes each way.
The house is now a shop (perhaps it was an estate agents) so I imagine that lovely garden would be a car park now.
I got the impression that more people who settled in Streetly came from the Black Country than from Brum, but it was Staffordshire, and quite close to Walsall.
It always seems to me that gardens (especially front gardens) are better looked after in the Black Country than in Birmingham - even today. I always enjoy riding upstairs on a bus looking at front gardens. There are some marvellous ones around Sedgley.
Peter
 
I’m glad to see this thread about gardening as it gives me chance to relate this little story about a man who I admired greatly and who had such a profound effect on my life.

During WWII two houses at the rear of my granddads house were flattened in an air raid. The only access to these houses was by way of a narrow entry. So these properties after being made safe were left untouched and more or less as they were.

As the houses were owned by the same landlord as my granddads house, he approached the landlord with a deal. The deal was he would clear the site if he were allowed to rent it as additional garden. The landlord was no fool he jumped at the offer.

Granddads first job was to strip out everything that was salvageable, timber, window frames, bricks. All the timber that could not be reused was cut up for fuel for the fire in the house. He then stripped back all the topsoil from the site and he piled it up for reuse later. After putting all the rubbish on the site he could into the cellars he formed the rest into a bank at the top end of the boundary to his new garden.

His next job was to lay out his new garden into flower beds, vegetable beds and paths etc. His favourite flowers Lupin’s Chrysanthemums and Roses took pride of place. This was after he redistributed all the topsoil back around the site, and planted a privet hedge to hide the rubbish bank. He then laid a new lawn on top of where the cellars had been.

Granddads next door neighbour was a busy self employed painter and decorator who never had time for gardening. He had handed his garden into the care of my granddad years previously. In this garden granddad built two large greenhouses and a large potting shed and tool store from salvaged bricks, timber and window frames.

The outcome was he ended up with one of the biggest gardens in the area, and for the rest of the war the family and neighbours had all the fresh vegetables they needed

He did all this on his own, whilst carrying on with a full time job, and it was all done by a man that was declared unfit to serve his country as a member of the armed forces as he was born with his feet malformed and they had to be broken and turned the correct way round shortly after birth.

This was all before I was born, but the memories of that garden I will carry forever. The nights 3 or 4 of us kids would camp out on the lawn at the top end of the garden it was far enough away from the house for us to imagine we were alone in the countryside and it was near of us to creep back into bed if we got cold or scared in the middle of the night. Then there were the bonfire parties on November 5th. It seemed that half the street came to those. The best thing of all though was all the fresh fruit and berries that we helped ourselves to throughout the summer months. Strawberry’s Raspberry’s Gooseberry’s etc they were all delicious.

From the end of the war until my grandparents moved, there was not a day that went past that my grandfather didn’t spend time in that garden. When the council decided to demolish the property it broke his heart, on the day that they moved my grandparents out I did not have the heart to be there. They moved them to a block of pensioners flats near the Maypole. Granddads garden was a square piece of scrub land about 15ft x 15ft, for weeks he never even touched it. He was finally talked into going out and making a start on it, once he started he was approached by all the other residents of the block asking if he wished to look after their plots as well as his own, they were not capable. So once again he ended up with a reasonable sized garden and was a happy man for the years remaining to him.


Phil

Granddad.jpg
 
Phil
Your grandfather sounds a great bloke. I'm a bit like his neighbours, not into gardens, but can admire and respect someone with the determination to acheive something like that
Mike
 
Phil, that is a really great memory story and I have always loved gardens as did my parents. It's a bittersweet story but it's so incredible how one man could achieve so much right to the end of his life in the way of preparing the gardens and growing such wonderful produce for his family and neighbours.
Thanks for posting.
 
Great posting, Phil, and a wonderful commemoration of a remarkable man. I was hoping that this thread would spark of a contribution like that and let's hope there are more.


Thanks for your comment, Peter. I've been thinking about our neighbours there and whilst there may well have been some from other areas, the ones near us mostly seemed to have had their roots in Birmingham as my parents did - and several of them, before the distractions of telly, were keen gardeners. A lot of neglect after 1940 though, at least on the ornamental side.

It's a pity that the grain size of these very early colour slides (Dufay positives) is not better to permit sharper definition; but I thought it worthwhile to post them (thereby emulating Dr. Johnson's philosophy regarding a dog walking on its hind legs - "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all"). I have a few more from that time, 1937, and also from 1942. Much vegetable growing by then of course but the lupins and poppies were still in evidence.

If you remember Puddepha's you might be interested in a bit of rubbish I once wrote about that stretch of road, here.

Chris
 
Chris

Thanks for you comments, I am sure that your father was also a remarkable man. He must have been to establish so lovely a garden. I am only glad of the opportunity to relate this little tale of my grandfather, I think he and you father would have got along great together. Its only a pity they didn't live next door to each other.

Phil
 
Lovely stories and thank you both for sharing them with us. My dad grew up in a back to back so when he had his own small garden he looked on it with pride. My parents moved into a terraced house in Witton just before the war in '39, so the air raid shelter took up most of the garden. Living two houses away was the aunt of an old school friend of dads', she was pleased to let him take over her garden, and as she was happy to share a neighbour's shelter Dad dug it over and planted potatoes.
After the war once the shelters were dug over dad sowed a small rectangle of grass we proudly called the lawn, he laid a path makng the concrete slabs himself and built a cucumber frame. The cucumbers were his pride and joy, the glass sliding top was coated with white paint and had to be opened and closed according to the weather. He walked up the garden before going into the house when he got home from work each day. He came home one day with a bag of bulbs, he dug a border and planted them telling us that they were prize Gladioli. They were too, they grew and grew and the blooms were huge. At the onset of autumn the bulbs were taken up and stored in the shed, wrapped carefully and put in trays on his bench. They only saw one summer in our garden because the wife of the friend who had happily given them away insisted that he get them back.
 
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