Treasures in the Garden

If you bury your memories, make sure they are sealed up

My motivation for vacuuming the house is that I get to keep any money I find. 

Granted it’s never that much, but the odd fifty cent piece pays for an ice cream every now and then. I also have the same policy when getting the washing out of the machine. Any stray coins in the drain hole are mine. 

It’s also a great feeling to unearth something from the depths of the sofa and the same feeling applies to when you find a hidden treasure in the garden. There are stories of people finding gold coins, wedding rings attached to carrots and maybe an ancient standing stone that was covered over by accident when the house was built. My sister in law found a buried WW2 bomb shelter in her garden which was a bit of a surprise.

Of course most of us don’t really find anything other than an old rusty garden trowel, which in a way might be a good thing. If I think about what I’ve buried in gardens in the past then these items are best left untouched. I’ve lost count of the number of pets that have gone into the ground. There was a survey done by Primrose not too long ago and found 44% of people have buried cats and dogs, birds, rabbits and fish take up 26% and a worrying 27% of people surveyed said the things the bury in the garden are ‘Undisclosed’ 

Other things people bury range from a piano frame, letters to their future selves, broken baths, bananas to ward off verruca’s to an old hard drive and even the ‘husbands dinner’

I’ve laid a few other things to rest over the years other than the family pets. When I was pre-teen I had a bit of a thing for burying Action Men in the garden. It’s no doubt an indication of my adolescent state of mind as I tended to torture them first with fire and then seal them up in plastic. Die cast cars and plastic soldiers got the same treatment and are no doubt still in their resting places. I’m sure there’s a Netflix series in there somewhere. 

As I got a bit older (not much) I then resorted to burying packs of Number 10 cigarettes in our local park on the way home from school so my mother wouldn’t find them on me when I got home for my tea. I’d dig them up again in the morning on the way to the bus stop and take up the back seat of the double decker puffing away like crazy until getting to school then repeating the same thing on the way home.

Only 4% of people asked in the survey buried time capsules for their children and grandchildren. It’s probably the equivalent of bookmarking something on the computer now but putting together time capsules used to be very exciting events. I remember the fuss and fanfare when Blue Peter buried their tin of historical items back in 1971. John Noakes Valerie Singleton and Peter Pervis put in photos of themselves along with some tapes and decimal coins. It was dug up recently and nothing had survived the damp and microbes. 

There have been a couple buried since and hopefully they learned to seal the containers with more than Sellotape. The middle box contained such treasures as hairs from Goldie the Blue Peter Labrador, a record of the programme's theme tune arranged by Mike Oldfield and video footage of the moving of Petra's statue who was the shows first pet dog from 1962 (to 1977). 

The last capsule buried in 1998 is called the Millennium Time Capsule. As well as containing Blue Peter items including a badge and history of the programme, the capsule also contains a set of Teletubby dolls, an insulin pen and a France '98 football. The time capsule will be opened in 2050. If you can’t wait that long until it’s unveiled I’m sure you’ll find some images to look at on your phone.

There are stories of people finding complete cars, loaded guns; hand grenades even planes in their garden but as the Blue Peter capsules show, most things are reclaimed pretty quickly when buried into the earth, unless it’s plastic that just gets smaller and smaller until it enters the food chain.

Everything you dig up in the garden will have a story behind it. If you find an old scorched Action Man with its elasticated limbs dislodged wrapped in plastic, spare a thought for the angst of childhood.