I never thought I’d enjoy something so filthy. I used to pay for it, you know, using the rationale that some things should be outsourced because doing them yourself is dangerous: sensitive personal area waxing, for example.
Now I do it myself, and I have callouses on my hands as a result.
Yes, I have finally reached the age where I enjoy gardening.
Gardening is a brutal contact sport. The garden doesn’t want to be tamed. Anyone who’s ever had to dig a grave in a forest will tell you that displacing quantities of soil requires you be in top physical condition. If you’re really serious about gardening you’ll need an arsenal: loppers, spade, secateurs, a pickaxe, chainsaw.
I step out onto the deck armed to the teeth, like a baddie from a spaghetti western, and still end up criss-crossed in a bleeding lattice at the end of the day, crawling my way back up the path, panting, to flop down in the La Z Boy, black of fingernail, back aching.
For everything there is a season. Youth is to be unaware of your surroundings, blissfully consumed with inner turmoil. As you get older you notice things more because they keep happening and time starts speeding up. Leaves fall, frost turns the lawn white, things get muddy, flowers bloom, leaves fall. You only step on a rake once.
Massive spiders are unhomed as I strip away layers of passionfruit vine and disembowel shrubs that do not please me, using my pickaxe to clear a path through the jungle. I may not be able to control many, many, many things in my life but here in the garden I have dominion, power over life and death. Failure to thrive is viciously punished. Neglected to show a sunny face to the world? Looking a bit droopy? You’re going to be ripped out and cast on the burning pile. Even David Seymour would think I was cold-blooded.
I am a despot. A giantess. Look upon my works ye mighty. All my tools are orange. Orange is the mark of quality in garden implements, I feel [also possibly indicating epigenetic Protestant bias? - ed.] plus you can always see them laying in the foliage, unlike that green rake.
At the moment things are a bit grim. My resplendent red acer is just a stick with nubs on and my peony bulbs are snoozing under the earth. Having dug out the slippery death-trap brick steps, the bank where I will plant things is nothing more than mud and dreams. It looks like the sad winter cow paddock of a very naughty farmer.
Every obsession has its nomenclature and I’m learning the language. Deciduous, perennial, rhizome, transplanting, vermicomposting. I’ve made a plan of the shrubs and trees I want to plant in my seaside garden. The lady at the garden centre is firm with me in a manner I now recognise as the savage honesty of the experienced gardener. She shouts at me sometimes to reinforce the seasonality of planting. "No, you cannot plant fuchsias now! You will have to wait until spring."
For some reason this makes me happy. I’m glad I have to wait, and I am one of the most impatient people you will ever meet. I think it’s because having something to look forward to is a wonderful gift when it feels like hard times are never ending; when it feels like there will never be money for nice cheese, ever again.
I’m glad because in spring, change will come. My peonies will emerge from their sleep, the garden will bloom in a marvellous multicoloured love letter to the bees, and I will be able to say I did it all myself.
