My First Contact with a Garden Centre

My first contact with a garden centre was on a dreary Saturday morning in mid 1980’s. I was awoken from a deep and comfortable sleep by a hammering on the back door of my mum and dad’s house in rural Ireland. Bleary eyed and still somewhat comatose I unlocked the back door to find a man waiting impatiently at the back door.
“This if for ye. Keep it away from the dog.” He said, handing me a clear plastic bag with a pale brown powder in it.
“What?!” I blurted out. Before I could get an explanation from the enigmatic, hurried man he had headed for our gate.
“The plants are out the back. Tell your mother sorry about the delay” He shouted as he leapt into a small white van with a huge red rose printed on the side and sped off out of my life.
I stood stunned for a moment or so and tried to comprehend what had happened. Plants? Brown powder? Had this been a drug drop to the wrong house or worse still the right one?
I gingerly stuck my head around the back of the house and saw, lying against the wall, a collection of green plants and bare trees. They had tags that said “White Beam” and “Sky Rocket”. Although I had lived in the country all my life and knew most, if not all, of the native trees these names were new to me and sounded more like the latest offering from Ford or Opel.
I had a vague recollection of my mum and dad out measuring, discussing and gesticulating on the newly planted lawn in the front half acre of our site. At that stage of my life I was more interested computers, TV and reading to bother with what was happening in the front garden. The last time I had “worked” in the garden was picking potatoes, years previously, in the drills that formed an excellent hiding place from my older sisters and picking the buds of my mum’s pink roses, which were planted closer to the house. I don’t think she knew it was me. She thought she had a strange new bug or bird which would pick and peel the buds leaving them scattered in the potato drills. Little did she know that no amount of sudsy water was going to solve the problem. (I guess I’m in trouble now!)
The brown powder turned out to be Bone Meal of course and my mum and dad dutifully put a handful of it under each plant as they planted the first “real” plants we ever had in our garden. My mum hasn’t looked back since and to this day, although the house has changed, her passion for plants hasn’t.