My head next to the huge sunflower

It hadn’t even occurred to me that the front garden could be improved. It’s not like I hadn’t noticed it: I walk through it every day. There’s a back garden which is tended by the people who live at the back of the building, but no one had taken responsibility for the front. It didn’t look too bad – it wasn’t high with weeds. Bluebells appeared in the spring, Day Lilies flashed by in June, and there was also a creeping plant with yellow flowers and a fuchsia bush. Admittedly, the creeper had taken over a third of the space, the fuchsia another third and the rest was uneven, scrappy yellow grass.

Then in March I found myself unemployed – I needed a project besides job hunting. I enjoy gardening and must have mentioned it to Andrew, from the back of the building, who suggested getting to work on the front. Of course!

A completely new beginning was called for: Up came the creeping plant, a neighbour got one of the out-sized Day Lilies and I starting turning the earth. It was filled with unruly weed and plant roots, as well as bits of glass, brick, slate and plastic. Digging is a satisfying task – good physical labour with no thinking needed. Progress is measured by freshly tilled earth and an ever-growing pile of stones and weeds.

It was around this time that I started to get to know my neighbours. On their way to work or when popping out to the shops, they would remark on the garden. It turned out the previous mess had been getting them down. Soon we were swapping plants and ideas.

With a new bed I could plant flowers around the edge, next to the wall. I wasn’t going for radical garden design, but it should be an improvement. I acquired flowering plants wherever I could: Deptford Market and Brockley fair, Phoebe’s garden centre, my sister and mum, an offer from a newspaper I found on the train and four rose bushes from B&Q. The kitchen became a mass of propagating trays and pots. In the sweltering May heatwave, I regularly watered the flower beds. To keep the slugs out I followed my sister’s suggestion of surrounding the lupins with plastic bottles that had their tops and bottoms chopped off.

Slugs are a cruel enemy. It was very difficult to keep seedlings alive despite their plastic collars. One rainy Sunday night, I found six slugs and snails on one small lupin. I hurled them across the road in a fury. A couple of hours later I went out to check the plant and found it had been singled out for oblivion: another five slugs were attached to the plant’s stubby remains. Another time, the protective bottle-sleeve a small plant was breached when a nasturtium flopped on top of it, which the slugs then used it as a ladder and plopped down into the plastic stockade to eat the seedling.

It was a slug Helmand Province and radical action was called for. Despite my better instincts I put down slug pellets. The result was mounds of snail shells, but finally the plants seemed to be growing.

It may be unadventurous, but I wanted to plant grass. In the middle of the garden I put in a small, oval-shaped raised bed, and a lawn seemed a good way to fill the space around it. So, during the June heatwave, I hired a Streetcar car to fetch some turf. Piled on palettes at B&Q,  the rolls of turf were hot to touch, and there seemed to be smoke coming out of them, although I suppose it must have been steam.

Unrolled at home, large amounts of the grass turned out to be grey. Still, I laid it all and then watered it day and night. After a week the grey grass was now yellow, while the healthy bits were livid green and starting to grow. It seemed dead, but Andrew at the back suggested that it might be like the grass in Hyde Park during the hot summer of 2004. That summer the grass went entirely yellow, but regained its natural colour when the Autumn rains came. After a few more days I became convinced this was not a passing phase – the grass was dead.

At B&Q I not only tried to get a return on the grass, but as I’d originally had to hire a car to pick it up, it seemed only reasonable that they should deliver the replacement. The disinterested staff pointed out that B&Q did not do returns on perishables and furthermore, they don’t deliver turf. This seemed unusually poor customer service, so I persisted. It took three more visits to get hold of a senior manager who agreed to deliver some replacement turf at a convenient time. After careful tending and watering, the grass turned jungle-green with a Henri Rousseau-like thickness.

The plants bloomed. The stock flowered white, mauve and purple, and the cultivated geranium is still a shocking magenta. Native to the Mojave Desert, the phacelia, sprawled hairy blue across the flower bed onto the lawn. The roses are on their third budding so far this summer. The tiny raised bed has filled our salad bowl with bountiful rocket, various lettuce varieties, long black French radish sent over by the lovely Autumn’s mum and courgette from my sister.

But it’s the sunflowers that get the attention. Grown from seeds bought in the Lewisham 99p shop, I managed to bring five to flower (not including the one I gave to my next door neighbour). The first sunflower, hidden away at the back of the bed, reached my chest in height and put a smile on my face; the second gave the first company. The third sunflower has been getting all the attention. It must tower seven or eight feet high. It has a trunk wider than a can of Red Bull and leaves wider than tins of Quality Street. Its bulging, convex face is twice as large as a football; it’s a vegetable mirror-ball dancing with bees.

Everyone seems to like it. Autumn heard a young child excitedly shriek, “Mummy, mummy – look at the ginormous sunflower.” This Sunday morning I noticed two elderly West Indian ladies, dressed in lavender and mauve Sunday best after the service in the Baptist church on the corner, stop and admire its glow. A sunflower-loving friend who I told about this monster remarked, “Who could be annoyed if you see a sunflower?”