The Secret Glamour of the Pumpkin Patch
I'll be honest with you. For about thirty years of growing pumpkins, squashes and courgettes, I treated the flowers the way most blokes treat the instructions leaflet in a flat-pack wardrobe — I knew they were there, I walked past them constantly, and I never once stopped to actually look properly. Then last week Fern came up to the allotment with her phone out, crouched down in front of a pumpkin flower for a good five minutes, and said, "Dad, this is honestly gorgeous, why have you never shown me this before?" And do you know what? She had a point. I'd been so busy watching for the pumpkin itself, or worrying whether the courgettes were about to stage another one of their overnight growth spurts, that I'd completely missed the fact that I'm growing some of the showiest flowers on the entire plot. Bold, trumpet-shaped, orange as a Lincolnshire sunset, and about the size of my hand. I've been ignoring a free flower show for three decades. My dad would h...
