Gardening

It is quite remarkable how your attitudes to certain things evolve over the course of your life. My taste in music, for example, has developed over the years from my early nineties standpoint of militantly avoiding anything that featured guitars, to my eclectic later years where the majority of the music to be found on my iPod is now guitar-based. I once remarked, to the amusement of my guitar-playing girlfriend of the time, that the sonic potential within the guitar was limited to the point that the instrument was ‘linear and boring’. If she were to glance at my music collection some ten years on, she would be quite smug to see my collection includes pieces by Robert Fripp, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Wire’s Bruce Gilbert – artists that have built their career on exploiting the guitar’s limitless potential and rendering my ‘linear and boring’ argument null and void.

There are countless other examples where I have revised my view of things with the passing of time (despite being adamant that I’d never change my mind), but this one is about gardening. If you have yet to be swayed by gardening’s charms, than I don’t expect to convert you, and I won’t mind if you decide not to carry on reading.

Like cooking, gardening is something that I never partook of as a child. Deciding where to put bedding plants and shrubs was chiefly my mother’s role; hoeing the beds, cutting down trees and mowing the lawn my father’s. The garden, for much of my childhood, was simply a place to knock tennis balls about in, and in my teenage years somewhere to sit in the summer. But now, as with cooking, I consider tending for our garden among my passions.

While I never helped out in the garden, I never took the garden for granted; I never wantonly destroyed plants with footballs or sat there pulling the petals off pansies, and remember feeling justly sorry when my Spacehopper flattened one of my mum’s roses. Part of my respect for the garden at our house came from the fact that prior to moving there, we lived in flats and therefore had no garden of our own.

In the first few years of living at the house my parents still live in to this day, they set about transforming the rear garden, inserting rockeries and feature beds and cutting down trees to produce what is today a largely shrub-filled mature garden with plenty of colour in the summer, and a patio filled with exotic tropical plants which my sister’s move to Cornwall has informed. The grass is always neatly mowed, weeds are a rarity and the whole garden has a well-kept order to it.

At the time, though I loved having a garden, it was more for recreational reasons and not because I had any interest in plants, trees or nature in general. And therefore the trips to various local garden centres were about as boring as watching grass grow, and my mother’s avid studying of the Dr Hessayon guides about the most tedious activity I could comprehend at the time. I was probably a complete brat while being escorted around the local nurseries, and if I know myself half as well as I think I do I no doubt complained about it being dull and that it was too hot in the greenhouses, and all the other things that little boys who prefer Star Wars figures and Lego generally do.

Fast-forward if you will to when my wife and I bought our first house. The house was a two-bedroom modern terrace with a small garden to the rear and a lawn to the front. I’d lived there for a couple of years already before we bought from the landlord, and had barely even been into the garden during that time. The conditions of the tenancy agreement were such that I was obliged to keep the garden tidy at all times, and – being the law-abiding, good citizen that I am – I bought a strimmer on the grounds that it was cheap, and arduously hacked away at the lawn every fortnight to keep it tidy. I did take one trip to a garden centre nearby while living as a tenant, and came away with some shrubs, which forced me to also buy some tools in order to create a border into which I planted the shrubs. To my amazement, they all survived, and in so doing the seeds of my future gardening passion began to germinate.

That said, as soon as my then-future wife and I bought the house, my inner sloth was awakened, and the garden rapidly became overgrown; we were in those first throes of love and tending to the garden was not at the top of our priorities. My father-in-law-to-be gifted me an old Flymo but I never touched it. I recall letting the grass grow so long that it looked more like a field of corn than a lawn, and was so dense that we once lost our cat among it. After a while I became suitably ashamed and set about mowing it using the Flymo, only to find all too late that using a lawnmower on two foot grass is not at all advisable, resulting in the gifted Flymo spitting flames as it burned itself to an electrical grave at the centre of our garden. Before putting that house on the market, we finally tackled both the front and rear gardens and in very short order produced something that we were both justifiably proud of, but which wasn’t really for our benefit at all.

Moving to our current house gave us a much larger canvas to play with, and crucially it was already an established, if unimaginatively laid out garden. The previous owner had grouped together several different types of plants, only instead of spreading these around the garden, they were kept together. So we had camellias in a line down the right hand side, hebes grouped together in one corner, rhododendrons in another and so on. Now into our third year of living in this house, with the exception of the general shape of the beds, the garden is fundamentally changed from when we moved in.

With each passing year my interest in the garden grows, as does my confidence as an amateur gardener. I now love going to the garden centre, myself peruse those Dr Hessayon books which are reassuring unchanged from when my mother read them in the 1980s, and every year get a little bit more adventurous in what I attempt to achieve.

However, despite all this enthusiasm, I must concede that I am a terrible, awful gardener. Whether by soil type, pest, overwatering or more likely sheer ineptitude, my success rate with buying plants from a nursery is nearly zero, with plants often withering and dying within days of being introduced to our borders. Bedding plants have proven a complete waste of time unless planted into containers on the patio, and the garden is filled with lots of shrubs that provide attractive greenery all year round but hardly any colour during the summer.

This year we decided that we wanted, like so many others, to introduce a meadow-like quality into our garden, and therefore we meticulously cleared out some of the shrubbery, prepared the soil and planted some wildflower seeds that we’d bought at the Eden Project. Our vision was to have dense borders filled with colours and butterflies, swaying gently in the summer breeze. The slugs in the garden had other ideas. After leaving the seeds to grow in the beds for a few days, to my dismay I inspected the beds only to discover the tiny shoots uniformly munched away by hungry insects. Thus, once again, our borders will remain characterless this year, only in some ways more so since we cleared out many of the existing plants to make room for our desired garden.

After a few years of leaning on my father-in-law to grow plants from seed, I decided that a degree of independence was required as I approached thirty, and therefore invested in a propagator and mini-greenhouse. I started to get very enthusiastic and protective about the progress of my tiny seedlings – cosmos, Korean mint, sweet peas, sunflowers, asters, and after a degree of success, tomatoes and runner beans – and watched them get stronger in the greenhouse. As of last week, owing to two separate incidents of high winds in Milton Keynes which caused the greenhouse to collapse, I was left with nine sweat peas, seven cosmos (of the original 24), no asters, two Korean mint and some shameful-looking tomatoes. The sunflowers survived best, and one specimen reached a grand three feet before another windy day this week snapped it neatly in half. Cue a complete switch back to my pre-teenage ways, in other words a big old toys-out-of-the-pram strop and a genuine exclamation along the lines of ‘that’s it; the bloody garden can go to hell for all I care.’

Despite another largely unsuccessful bout of gardening I find my passion once again undiminished. A haphazard sowing of forget-me-nots and some unscathed wildflowers that appear to be avoiding the attention of the slugs has given my confidence something of a boost and it may be that we in fact do get some colour in the garden this year. Already my mind is filled with new plants to grow and features to weave into the garden, books on plants and flowers that I want to buy…and a growing realisation that as I get older the more motivated I become by the things that I hated as a child.