Everything In The Garden Is Not Lovely

I have been gardening for most of the day. I have sticky buds in my hair, dirt under my fingernails and my hands are cut to ribbons by some particularly toothsome raspberry canes that self seeded in the back border. Although the most damage came from embedding a rose thorn into the fleshy part of my thumb. I also jammed my bare toe into the side of the garden bench. I don’t think it’s broken. Maybe.

I’d say I have another two, full days of gardening to do to get it back to where it was before disaster struck and the garden fell to number 358 of things that must be done urgently.

The only creature who is thrilled to see me in the garden (apart from the landlord) is an extremely beady robin who has been keeping me company as I unearthed a trillion wood lice and lots of scuttling things with too many legs. I have been providing him with an all you can eat buffet.

If there were any thrushes left in this part of the world, they would have been delighted at the vast number of snails I displaced as I hacked and swore in a distinctly non Monty Don type way. As the only thrush I’ve seen in the past ten years was in a hedge as I was passing through Northumberland, there is nothing to get excited about on the proliferating snail front.

Gardening is filthy, hard work. You spend days and days sweating to make the garden look nice, go on holiday for a week and come back to find everything either dead or multiplying like rabbits in places they shouldn’t be. As soon as it’s the way you want it, you have to start looking after it all over again.

Plants are more problematic than children. They are too wet or too dry, in too much sun or not enough. They don’t like the clay except when they do. They flower one year and then do nothing for seven years on the bounce. They are full of things that want to eat me. Some plants themselves want to eat me. Everything is filthy all the time, including me. All the things I don’t want to have healthy roots embed themselves in the earth’s core and take a team of enormous turnip pullers to remove. All the things I do want lie wanly on the soil, coughing and fretting and getting frost bitten or sun burned.

Gardening is not a hobby. Gardening takes over your life. It is not wafting about with secateurs and a trug, dead heading roses in a fancy hat. It’s pulling a dock leaf out of rancid pond and accidentally swallowing the water that came with it and getting the first recorded case of typhoid in the East Midlands in fifty years.