Hydrangea days…

Just one of the hydrangea heads in my back yard, but whenever I look at the perfection of the blooms I’m taken back to another time.

Warning: the next sentence is - ‘when I was a boy.’

When I was a boy I had a Saturday job at a large house with a huge garden not far from the town where I lived. It was a twenty minute bus ride and a short walk from the stop, which was really just a post in the middle of nowhere; and on a damp Saturday evening in October it was a miserable nowhere to wait for a bus.

The gardens weren’t grand but they were large enough to be laid out, and at the front of the Georgian house was a screen of tall trees which hid all but the many roofs from the road. Off to the right of the house, leading from the drive to the main lawns, was a walkway flanked on either side by the most amazing hydrangeas. They grew so close together that they formed a tunnel hedge, and at over six feet high they were certainly imposing.

In summer they flowered white, pink, and blue. But as the autumn became almost winter - the trees beginning to be stripped to black by the wind, making the crow’s nests, high in the branches above, rock and fall to the ground -  the colour faded and they turned to the gentile washed-out of old brown paper, the sort that you find lining unloved dusty drawers. Hydrangea heads, old paper dry to crush and crackle in a young boy’s hand.

One of my jobs was to cut back these dried heads in the autumn and burn them on one of the huge bonfires that I and the gardener, Marsh, built behind the old stable block. What a noise those hydrangea heads made as they burnt, crackling and popping and giving off an aroma like incense and Indian tea.

I can smell it now, see the bright orange flames, feel my outstretched hands warming with the heat, and hear the cry of crows, the sizzle of burning hydrangea stems full of sap boiling on my bonfire.

Then dusk; a dark walk to the bus, and home for tea with a few bob in my pocket. It was as easy as that back then.