Day 177 - How Does Your Garden Grow?

 HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?

Prompt - How Does Your Garden Grow? : Write about a flower that grows in an unusual place

Was that what they call 'a seminal moment'?  Probably not, unless the subliminality of it resonated in ways I fail to understand.  I'm pretty clear about how and why and when my vocation for botany came to be, and it wasn't when I was eight years old.  Yet that fleeting discovery still comes back to me as a pointer, one small, early expression of who I was to become, and maybe it's enough that I think it so. 

The eighties were not kind to Scotland.  We were not the people Thatcher considered as 'us'.  Scrapheap material.  As a kid I was vaguely aware of the hardships in our wee town, that the times were not kind to mining communities.  I had no idea why, no reference frame that allowed me to ask the questions, and my parents were happy to keep it that way, shelter me from the worst.  What I saw was how little I, and most of my pals, were now getting for xmas, or birthdays.  The world had changed and we had to change with it.

It's such a cliche I know, but we really did have to make our own entertainment.  Health and safety had yet to kick in, children were allowed to wander and do whatever, as long as they got home for tea.  There were always adults around who knew you, it was that sort of place.  If you wanted the adventure of being beyond their gaze there were places to go.  The ones we were warned against, but without an outright ban being applied.

So it was that me and Gregorz found ourselves, one summer afternoon, exploring the slag heaps just off the Glasgow Road.  Gregorz Nowak.  I wonder he is now?  We lost touch over twenty years ago, but back in '88 we were best pals, egging one another on into further scrapes and falls from seeing if...  Always seeing if...  My friend had the same accent as me, a fourth generation Scot who'd never had any Polishness about him.  We'd been sat together in our first school class, and had remained close ever since.

We didn't really expect to find anything of interest at the heaps, but we'd been warned away from the area, and you never knew what might turn up.  We went because it was there, and it wasn't where we would usually be.  It was dirty, and we were soon looking like two overly excitable grey ghosts.  But it didn't take long for us to start feeling bored with the sameness of it all.  One slope was much like another, no summit offered more of a view than any other, and our only prize had been a hammer head without a handle.  So we headed for the burn, thinking that would at least allow us to clean up our skin and hair a bit.  That's when I saw them.

A little flash of colour amidst the sooty grime.  It was off to our left, nestled down a south facing slope, and I could so easily have missed it.  I called Gregorz back, to check out the find.  Three small purple flowers, with vivid yellow centres, clinging to a thin fissure in the surface.  There were a few scrappy flowers in our back garden, sometimes my mum had them in the house.  In the town square there were a couple of tubs with vegetation in them, which occasionally showed a bit more than green.  None of which I paid any attention to, or even noticed other than as a background to my world.  But this was different.  Something wild, that should never have been where it was, a floral rebel rising against the destruction of the landscape.  

Gregorz went to touch them, but I pulled him back, urging him to leave them.  I don't think I understood why, but it felt clear to me that they deserved respect.  For finding a way to appear in this unlikeliest of scenarios, and for providing relief from the gloom of our surroundings.  They should be left for others to discover and get the same sensation of having spotted something surprising, nature's hope upon the land.

Back then I had no idea what the flowers were.  Wee and purple with yellow bits was the limit of my descriptive ability.  Now I reckon they were probably aubretia, but by the time I knew that the heaps had been destroyed, replaced by building works and landscaping for the new industrial park.  My passion for plant life would be summoned into life by Miss Garton, my biology teacher, seven years later.  I resist the temptation to tell the story of the little purple flowers.