"Get off the flowers!"

Mum's Garden is inspired by my childhood, playing in the garden, the lush colours on the flowerbeds and smelling the sweet blooms my mother had nurtured from wee saplings and bulbs. Tools left parked in the soil after a day of weeding. The wisteria that frames the face of my family home, trickling petals of purple, and the yellow trumpets of daffodils, standing tall and proud. Sweetpeas climbing the fence in the back garden, twisting vines in the same curling shapes I'd doodle in the margins of schoolbooks. Sunflowers that found the sun despite growing in the more shaded area of the yard.

Our front garden was once home to a pond, where water lilies floated on the surface, and my own fascination with Monet still fuels my love for these flowers to this day. The greens and pinks mixed with rich blues and splashes of shy yellows make something inside me go - that's home. And perhaps that was because once I'd step out of the car after a long day of school, they were something I'd never be able to pass by without admiring them. A signal for summer's beginning. Had the water lilies bloomed yet, like the other flowers?