Co Dublin: €2mDays of fun and sunshine: writer Victoria Whiteremembers the garden of her childhood home in Booterstown, which is now for sale
It was always summer when I was growing up on Booterstown Avenue. You may quibble and quote meteorological reports, but you forget that time acts differently when it is remembered.
A memory of one day during the summer of 1976, when I walked home from school along freshly-mown Cross Avenue in a tulip-print dress and ate strawberries for lunch, expands to cover most of my childhood.
Number 95 has an unequal helping of garden - an extra bit left over from the carving up of the Sans Souci estate in the early 1950s - and is bordered by the old estate wall.
Here my mother Edna White created a kitchen garden which harked back to the garden of her childhood home Dunwiley in Stranorlar, Co Donegal.
The strawberries came in crops too big for our special Donegal strawberry dish, which had a sugar spoon shaped like a strawberry flower.
After we'd stuffed ourselves with those, on came the raspberries. I would steal out first thing on summer mornings to pick some for my cornflakes.
We three children all have our birthdays in the summer, and they were marked with buckets of fruit and squidgy sponges with fresh jam and cream.
We had plums, greengages, gooseberries and apples with real tastes and names like "James Greeve".
My mother would sit carving good bits out of bad apples, because we couldn't waste anything. In fact, we liked fruit better if a family of insects had got there first.
We had wigwams of French beans to hide in and sun-dried seaweed heads to pop in the asparagus bed.
Dinners in summer often started with my mother hoiking a string of sweet new potatoes out of the ground and boiling them with fresh mint.
She would get up from the table to cut a lettuce, and we ate the leaves with everything from salad cream to gravy.
I know we ate steak and kidney pie from a tin too, but its memory has disintegrated just as the pastry did.
My mother was a notable gardener, who wrote The Irish Times gardening column for about 10 years.
But I couldn't have given a fig for her lesser spotted flowering grebes, or whatever they were.
I only cared about the bits of the garden I could eat. And it's hard to beat the rearing out of a person.
After 25 years of staying resolutely close to the city centre, I've moved to the 'burbs and bought myself an apple tree.
It's a smaller house than my mother's, but no hard feelings.
I hope it's always summer in 95 Booterstown Avenue for the new owners too.
• 95 Booterstown Avenue, Blackrock, Co Dublin: 190sq m (2,040sq ft) five-bedroom house will be sold at auction by Lisney on May 9th. It has an AMV of €2 million.
