I CAN'T believe it’s 30 years since me and my punk pals hung out at the Garden Festival.

I’ve got a thing about flowers. Maybe it’s an actor thing but as long as there’s flowers in a vase I feel am doing ok!

There’s loads written about the language of flowers, the sad white lily, mistletoe kisses, the forget-me-nots. I knew a spoiled girl once who scolded her fiancé because he’d bought an assorted bunch!

She said it showed he lacked commitment. Who knew? Give me a single orchid any day rather than a dozen red roses.

I love that they look like something out of a Ridley Scott film.

I once saw a guy come out of a flower shop. It said in the window, ‘Say it with Flowers’, and he was carrying a cactus!

I asked a florist what she thought about some folk endorsing an aspirin, some sugar, even a tuppence, in with cut flowers. She was outraged, “No, no, no!” she cried.

“The only thing a flower needs is clean water”.

She went on, that you ought never to use an opaque vase because even with a glass one you can’t always see the bacteria that kills and a rinse out with cold water will not cut it.

She insisted before each use all vases must go through the dish washer, adding; ‘Have you ever smelt old

geranium water?’ Actually, I have, and we are talking gents public urinals.

I’ve never actually had a garden but growing up there was always the back green.

There were butter cups that you would hold under your chin to prove you liked butter. Bedecked in our daisy chains jewellery, we could tell the time with the pee-the-bed ‘pom-pom’.

Better still, the petals of a flower could tell you whether he loved you or loved you not!

Then there were the wild rose petals bashed in water to make your own perfume.

Or imagining serving tea made with the laburnum tree seeds we all knew were poison.

Am loving that Glasgow, like a bunch of old industrial cities where the loss of industry has left us with huge areas of unused space, has now, a whole host of thriving community gardens.

There’s loads of them and anyone can volunteer to be a part of them!

Woodlands Community Garden's pop up cafe even offers, every Monday, a shared meal from the gardens produce that everyone cooks together!

I know a lad called Johnny who has struggled with a lot of stuff and he says gardening with the mix of folk there, literally all mucking in together, has been a life saver.

There’s an amazing man called John Hancock at the Botanics.

He has run the children’s garden there for decades. They’ve only gone and planted fruit trees in my old abode Castlemilk and Drumchapel.

He told me the best choice were apple, plum and pear, as these old Scottish Heritage varieties, fare well in our changeable climate. Offering fruit in the autumn and blossom in the spring. The blossom alone would have done me

but homegrown fruit on your doorstep! I stood under some blossom and thought of Dennis Potter who at the end, sees, ‘The whitest, frothiest, blossomiest blossom that there ever could be.’

Find a Community Garden near you at scotland@farmgarden.org.uk

THIS WEEK’S HIGH FALUTIN’ CONUNDRUM:

The precipitous avian vertebrate ensnares the annelid.

LAST WEEK’S HIGH FALUTIN’ CONUNDRUM:

It is inadvisable to surface clear of, using the muscles of the leg and feet, an instrument with a metallic tube or barrel from which a missile is discharged.

ANSWER:

Don’t jump the Gun.

YOU KNOW YOU'RE OLD WHEN;

The comment ‘getting down and dirty’ suggests to you a spot of gardening.