The Full Monty

As a signifcant birthday approaches, Monty reflects on how attitudes to gardens and gardening have changed, and so much for the better

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I tend not to make much of a deal about birthdays - they are a good excuse for a cake, if any were needed - but I treat them like the arrival of the first swallow or the first bright frost of autumn - a familiar marker I hope will return for at least one more year. But once you break through the 21 barrier, all subsequent birthdays with a nought attached inevitably give pause for reflection and, increasingly, thoughts about how best to spend the diminishing time ahead.

Seventy years ago, three score years and 10 was still thought of as your allotted span, with everything over and above that a bonus. But in those post-war years of the 1950s and 60s, almost everyone except the young seemed old and tired. I now realise they were exhausted by the war and longing for a quiet life, with pottering in the garden a luxury that few today can conceive. Both my parents died in their mid-sixties, burnt out and older than their years, too much of their allotted span used up before they reached 30.