Old rose

When we bought this house, over forty years ago, we left ourselves some six weeks to have some decoration and woodworm eradication done before we moved in with our 18 month old child. We got the keys in May, and on sunny June days I used to push the pram into town from Ardenslate, where we lived in a school house, and come and sit in the back garden on the grass and smell the wonderful scent of this old rose and marvel that for the first time we had a garden worth the name.

Our first house was a ground floor flat in Hyndland - very small, with a tiny front garden in a hugely desirable area. We did no gardening - I can't even recall what was in the garden other than an azealea that we bought in Milngavie and which still, now in its third garden, doesn't flourish because I forget to water it at the crucial stage of flower development. The garden of our council house was pretty miserable; I borrowed the kind next-door neighbours' lawn mower to keep it civilised, but there was a wardrobe buried in it, in pieces. God alone knows why.

So this rose, and its scent, takes me back to that first fine careless rapture of a garden in which flowers grew. I caught the scent this afternoon and in an instant I was young again - and the rose was still old, even then.