WHEN we were little, we didn’t really have a garden.

My father was no gardener and my mother too busy bringing up five children to nurture plants

We did have two lawns at the front of our council flat and a massive plot to the rear, but in the half century my parents lived there, they never planted a thing.

The previous tenants had been quite industrious though, and had left behind a flourishing lilac tree, several fruit bushes yielding luscious blackcurrants and gooseberries, and a single rose bush of unusual vigour, as well as a network of neat brick paths.

My dad worked nights and slept during the day, so the garden was allowed to grow wild, until the lawn grew almost a foot high.

The grass was great for hiding in, and provided a habitat for all manner of insects, as well as frogs, toads and the odd newt.

The lilac tree proved a useful asset in the never-ending wars with the children from neighbouring streets, for any captives would be tied to it, and threatened with unspeakable tortures if they didn’t tell us their plans.

The unkempt wilderness came into its own each November, when it hosted our annual bonfire.

Roman candle fights with the kids in the next street were commonplace, and the night was not complete until a rip-rap – or jumping jack – had hopped inside someone’s welly, ensuring a merry dance to help digest the treacle toffee, parkin and incinerated potatoes from the embers of the fire.

We didn’t even have to wait until Bonfire Night for a conflagration in our garden – every so often, my father would become irritated by the waving pampas grasses tapping on his bedroom window, and set fire to the whole lot.

His scorched earth policy eventually put paid to the fruit bushes and the lilac – as well as earning my father the undying hatred of greenfingered neighbours – but never seemed to inhibit the grass returning with even more vigour.

And as for that rose, it would rise phoenix like from the ashes every summer, whirling its way round the entire garden without benefit of fertiliser of any description.

My parents are long gone, but I bet that rose is still flourishing in the old back garden, and indeed cuttings from it grace the gable end of Hextol Towers to this very day, more than 70 years after the original plant first took root.

It is about to burst into fragrant flower again, despite a troubled upbringing which saw it uprooted and chewed by the dog after being planted up here in 1979.

Unlike my father, I do try to keep the garden looking reasonably attractive, despite an almost criminal lack of basic gardening knowledge.

I cut the lawn and risk my life cutting the hedge a couple of times a year, but have no idea what is growing in the flower beds.

That is Mrs Hextol’s province, in cahoots with her sister, who is something of a Charlie Dimmock and keeps presenting us with plants she has acquired from various sources.

She will say: “I saw this growing in a pub garden over the border, and just took a little cutting . I have no idea what it is, but it might turn out OK.”

One pot she gave us produced what looked suspiciously like the sort of thing you see behind the skull and crossbones in the poison garden at Alnwick Castle, but she assures us it is completely innocuous.

The thing is, nothing seems to happen in the garden while we are in residence, but as soon as we go on holiday for a couple of days, all hell breaks loose.

The garden was newly trimmed and pruned before we went away, but 10 days later, you could hear the plants growing as soon as we got out of the car.

We could hardly open the garden gate for burgeoning greenery, and I would not have been surprised to have been attacked by a triffid, or at least confronted by a refugee from The Quatermass Experiment.

It took a full day to whip the garden back into shape, and I was left with a mystery on my hands – as the dog was in kennels throughout the holiday, how did a large lump of dog muck appear smack in the centre of the lawn in a fully-fenced garden?