secret gardens

I've never not had a garden. The rowhouse shoebox I live in now, with surrounding apartment buildings blocking the sky, and undesirables throwing their daily trash onto my property certainly doesn't allow for one. When I was a child, and also when my eldest daughter was younger, we had wonderful gardens to exhaust ourselves in. My daughters favorite movie is still The Secret Garden. There's something magical about being able to let your children out the back door and watch them run off to smell the flowers and check on their vegetable patch. Or seeing your dogs get rid of their energy outside of your livingroom. The parks near me are full of people who've never heard of taking turns on the swings, and who let their children happily knock mine off the slide or the stairs, without telling them that's wrong. And with the majority of them not being able to understand English, it's a little hard for me to ask them kindly not to do that. When I was little I loved having a climbing frame and swings in my garden. I adored my little garden my Mummy planted with me. Watching things grow, learning to feed and water the plants. I did the same for my eldest. She was in heaven picking her own flowers she'd grown from seed. Being able to have a bbq in your garden, letting your kids laugh loudly and run around on the grass, your dogs bark, without worrying about complaints from your 2 feet away neighbors. These things aren't important to City types, but they're important to me. Children are only little for such a short time, when they hit the 8 or 9 yr mark, none of this matters so much anymore. It just makes me so sad to know that my little children will never have what they should have - freedom to be themselves.