I've always hated gardening centres for as long as I can remember. The air is always stale and reeks of fertiliser, the people seem to have this vacant disdainful stare that follows you the whole way around and worst of all these little -middle-of-nowhere places are the ones my mother swears by to the point that she refuses to go anywhere else but her set three places.
We've used them for so long I can trace their pathways and plant selection with my eyes closed, picturing the way my mother runs her hands over as many leaves as she inconspicuously can and smelling the soil of each plant thoroughly before placing it delicately inside her basket. She never seemed to noticed that everyone did the exact same things as she did, albeit at different times, almost taking turns.
No matter what the gardening magazines said she'd always pick the same five plants as she always did (three of them being different colours of germanium and two being different coloured poppies) and they were always planted in the exact same places year in, year out. I could plot the date by which plant she was moving where, she'd set them up in certain positions and gradually rotate them around over the course of summer (so they all get equal amounts of light, or so she says).
Nothing brings back childhood memories quite like helping her lug a pot of dirt three times my weight from one end of the patio to the other so that whatever she was growing in there got good sun. Come to think of it, she never did tell me what she'd been growing in there but I do remember going with her to buy the pot in the first place.
I don't remember her picking out the pot or helping her put it into the car but I do remember worrying at some point about how stained it was on the inside and how it smelled like the tin cans we handed out for the harvest festival at school. Mum said it was just iron from the pot making process but I can safely say she was lying that time.
You see, the pot broke last night while she was asleep and I was the first down today. I remember now why she wanted that unseemly large pot and why she had to keep moving it about and why it had blood stains on the inside. I remembered I had a little brother.
He was about three at the time and loved eating anything his little hands could grab at. Mum left him for a few minutes to pot her regular plants and move them as she always had. She says that by the time she turned around he was already dead, granules of weed killer still stuck to his hand and around his foaming mouth but I remember otherwise.
I remember seeing her turn around from time to time while she was doing her regular moving, spotting him and carrying on like nothing had happened. The plants had to be potted and moved and she let him die. She told me to help her carry his limp little body onto a sack of soil and to wait until he woke up while she grabbed a doctor.
Only she came back with the pot and said the doctor advised that if we buried him head first then he'd just grow back up like all of her plants did. I was four, I didn't know better and she knew that. His body hit the bottom of the pot with a wet thud and bloody foam began to leak out of his mouth - a part of the process, mum said.
She poured dirt over him until nothing else showed and then told me we had to move him about so he got all the sun and nutrients and grew faster. I tried to forget it was him, somehow that made it all easier to the point where the pot became another one of mum's garden-things.
And then when I saw my brother again, under all that dirt and looking almost my age, I remembered.
We've used them for so long I can trace their pathways and plant selection with my eyes closed, picturing the way my mother runs her hands over as many leaves as she inconspicuously can and smelling the soil of each plant thoroughly before placing it delicately inside her basket. She never seemed to noticed that everyone did the exact same things as she did, albeit at different times, almost taking turns.
No matter what the gardening magazines said she'd always pick the same five plants as she always did (three of them being different colours of germanium and two being different coloured poppies) and they were always planted in the exact same places year in, year out. I could plot the date by which plant she was moving where, she'd set them up in certain positions and gradually rotate them around over the course of summer (so they all get equal amounts of light, or so she says).
Nothing brings back childhood memories quite like helping her lug a pot of dirt three times my weight from one end of the patio to the other so that whatever she was growing in there got good sun. Come to think of it, she never did tell me what she'd been growing in there but I do remember going with her to buy the pot in the first place.
I don't remember her picking out the pot or helping her put it into the car but I do remember worrying at some point about how stained it was on the inside and how it smelled like the tin cans we handed out for the harvest festival at school. Mum said it was just iron from the pot making process but I can safely say she was lying that time.
You see, the pot broke last night while she was asleep and I was the first down today. I remember now why she wanted that unseemly large pot and why she had to keep moving it about and why it had blood stains on the inside. I remembered I had a little brother.
He was about three at the time and loved eating anything his little hands could grab at. Mum left him for a few minutes to pot her regular plants and move them as she always had. She says that by the time she turned around he was already dead, granules of weed killer still stuck to his hand and around his foaming mouth but I remember otherwise.
I remember seeing her turn around from time to time while she was doing her regular moving, spotting him and carrying on like nothing had happened. The plants had to be potted and moved and she let him die. She told me to help her carry his limp little body onto a sack of soil and to wait until he woke up while she grabbed a doctor.
Only she came back with the pot and said the doctor advised that if we buried him head first then he'd just grow back up like all of her plants did. I was four, I didn't know better and she knew that. His body hit the bottom of the pot with a wet thud and bloody foam began to leak out of his mouth - a part of the process, mum said.
She poured dirt over him until nothing else showed and then told me we had to move him about so he got all the sun and nutrients and grew faster. I tried to forget it was him, somehow that made it all easier to the point where the pot became another one of mum's garden-things.
And then when I saw my brother again, under all that dirt and looking almost my age, I remembered.
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