Raspberry Jam and Water Lilies

 

 

Last weekend me and mum went plant shopping up the back of Galle.  While I was wandering around the grounds of the plant shop, mum was sitting in the sun responding happily to the owner’s queries and comments and enjoying watching his grandchildren running around the garden. I have no idea what she was saying but she seemed quite content. This started me thinking about plants and gardens and in long convoluted brain journey, I ended up pondering the caravan and camping holidays we used to have in Scotland when we were kids and we all picked raspberries for hours on end.  Was this an early Scottish version of child labour? I couldn’t figure out why we picked so many rasps as we couldn’t possible have eaten them all. It took a while but the brain eventually made the connection to raspberry jam. Mum was always making jam and marmalade. Jam jars would be collected all year and set aside in a cupboard. In the summer there would be fruit in huge quantities, sugar in similar quantities and lots of jam jars ready to be sealed with plastic covers and elastic bands.  The kids were allowed to seal them. Pots would boil away for hours.  The result: we always had an endless supply of home-made marmalade and raspberry jam.

As well as a keen raspberry jam maker, Mum was an avid gardener and wuld spend hours happily tending the garden. She always had a garden in the various houses we had. In her second to last one we had a large sloping garden which started as veg and flowers, then as she got older, it changed to grass which was easier to manage, until even that became too much for her and she moved from that house into her much smaller house in Elmwood Court (part of a sheltered housing complex) where the gardens were maintained by professional gardens, an extremely chatty elderly gent, well loved by the ladies in the complex,  and his two sons.

The Clyde Valley was a place we often visited over the years in Scotland. This was the site of  - way back - plant shops very similar to the one in Galle. Fruit and flowers were on sale by the river. It was a lovely shady drive, a twisty turny road following the path of the river as it flowed on its way to Glasgow and the sea. The shops were seasonal – at any one time full of daffodils or potatoes.  Much later when the area developed into lots of Home Centres I would take mum for a drive and lunch there. In her later years in Bothwell I liked to make sure she had an amaryllis which we bought there.  You could buy the bulb in October and it would flower at some point over the winter. She cared for it and even when the Alzheimers was taking over, she continued to tend the flower and loved to watch it grow and then flower. They were spectacular. 

These days the lilies in the pond have usurped the amaryllis.  We have two kinds, one a big bright purple plant and a few smaller lilac ones.  They are Nil Manel or blue water lilies and in February 1986 they were chosen as the National flower of Sri Lanka. When we arrive on Friday we check the state of the flowers in the pond. Are there any? What colour are they? Where are they in the pond? Are they open or closed? Are there any buds breaking the surface? Then later in the evening again she remarks that the flowers have gone. She doesn’t quite get that they close overnight and then open up again the next morning. In the morning at breakfast there is the same check of the state of the flowers in the pond (around the same time we check on the whereabouts of the monkeys). They are constantly changing and she seems to get as much joy from them as she used to get from the amaryllis.