Flowers beginning with a ‘C’

With my parents having recently put their house on the market, announcing plans to move out of Nottinghamshire altogether, I’ve been thinking a lot about my childhood home and the hours my brother and I used to while away in the garden.

My brother and I used to play what we called ‘The Tree Game’, an inventively titled game based on hiding behind a sprawling tree surrounded by a low brick wall. When we grew too tall to comfortably hide behind the wall, we stopped playing, but one summer in our teenage years we revisited it for nostalgia’s sake, and found we loved it just the same. The leaves of that tree would scatter across the lawn every autumn; we’d crunch in them and help our parents in a futile cycle of raking them up despite knowing that the next day there would many more. The tree was chopped down eventually; my parents found it too difficult to manage, and it stopped the evening sun from streaming into our kitchen. Sometimes, when I lingered by the window to enjoy the golden light straying along the lawn, my eyes fell upon the raw stump, settling on the emptiness where the tree had been, the tree game a distant memory.

Though it bears no real trace of it now, I can’t visualise the lawn without also picturing the dents where the cricket stumps sat, and the weathered, yellow stretch of grass where my brother would run up and practice his bowling technique. When I bowled at him, he would expertly direct the ball low and fast. He’d bowl at me too, using a tennis ball, and the ball would regularly end up in our neighbour’s garden or stuck just underneath the hedge. He’d scramble between the branches and retrieve it, scratched and beaming, or we’d never recover it and he’d bring out yet another, somehow (much to my parents’ despair). “Can you give me some catches?” he’d ask, and I can see it so clearly: me chucking the ball into the air, squinting into the sun, the erratic throws giving him the great practice that surely contributed (at least in a small way) to shaping him into the wonderful wicket keeper he is today.

Incredibly green-fingered, my mum has always taken huge pride in our garden. Frequently, when I phoned home while at university, she would miss my incoming video call, ringing me back moments later with a cap on her head and one gardening glove still on. She’d show me the latest additions to her lunch: tiny carrots, enormous salad leaves, an abundance of plums. When my brother and I are home over Easter break, mum insists on taking photographs of us by the large bush with the pink flowers. An annual tradition, the photos chart a gradual height progression for all of us (me, my brother, and the plant) until my brother shoots up and we all somewhat level out. I can never quite remember the name of that plant. Tell me the letter it starts with, I implore my mum every year. I circle through all the Cs I can recall – chrysanthemums, carnations – but the name always eludes me. It’s a camellia shrub, of course it is, which, if loved right, will continue to bloom every spring.