Kingsley Amis once said gardening is like washing up outside.
So true. Just more bloody housework – only with weather. I have never been a fan of gardening but have finally learned to admit to it. Recently, a friend came to supper and looked out of my window into the ‘garden’ or, rather, the long and narrow outdoor space at the back of my small terrace house.
There he saw a few ugly breeze blocks fashioned by my adult sons into structures on which they can barbecue T-bone steaks; a blackened frying pan; bits of old newspaper; empty beer cans; cigarette butts; and some chicken wire.
No ‘re’ about the ‘wilded’ weeds and ivy everywhere; the muddy ground, odd tarpaulin, metal incinerator like an old-fashioned dustbin, broken, wooden chairs and, consuming the whole back third of the ‘garden’, a giant dustball of brambles so vast that it has swallowed a whole shed that hasn’t been visible for years.
Inside, my house is immaculate – I’m teased for having OCD. My favourite sound is the ktsss-k, ktsss-k of antibacterial spray, followed by wiping. Outside, it’s like a mini-New Age travellers’ site somewhere between Bath and Stroud, c 1993.
My aghast friend has a notable castle with a garden of gasping beauty open to the public. The look on his face on staring out at the grim plot was memorable. I have never seen a man at such a loss as to how to arrange his expression. Despite all his charm and for all his consummate manners, he just couldn’t contain his horror.
And I do not blame him. The truth is that no middle-class Englishwoman of a certain age in the history of the world has ever neglected a garden so manifestly. He was unable to compute that anybody whom, like me, he had known since he was at university 30 years ago, could be so wanting in the green finger department – and concomitant moral stature.
To give him his due, I don’t know a single other woman who doesn’t at least have a pot or two at her front door with geraniums or a camellia, a window box or a tiny terrace with some sort of foliage requiring watering. Let alone one who neglects her outside property so wantonly.
Gardening may not actually feature among the symptoms of the menopause listed on the NHS website. But it absolutely has a place alongside the hot flushes and mood swings.
I’m 60, don’t grow a sprig of rosemary and can only just identify a peony. It’s unique – especially given that my parents had a fabulous garden, when I was a child, in the Queen Anne house of my infancy. They had a gentle, full-time gardener who created a rose garden I still remember distinctly though we left when I was five. Further gardens followed, in London and the country, my mother keen and not unknowledgeable.
My friends took up the mantle of their own parents’ gardens. My old friend Sarah Raven, author of The Cutting Garden, did the flowers and bouquet at my wedding and I marvelled at her skill. My stepmother edited House & Garden for 21 years. My boyfriend is one of this country’s leading gardeners, whose knowledge of all living plants, flowers, shrubs and trees astounds and delights me every time we go for a walk.
I may add that he is, in turn, delighted at my disinclination and ignorance. He couldn’t stand to be with a gardening fanatic – he’d be bored rigid. I often remind him how lucky he is to have found me – female middle-aged garden-phobes are a rare species indeed.
Why has the bug passed me by?
Well, I lived in flats in Notting Hill till I got married. No outside space; only a communal garden that wasn’t mine to tend.
Our first house in Brook Green had a triangular garden the size of a supermarket Parmesan. Later, divorced, with my ex-husband living in Belfast, and with three young sons, I had no time, energy or spare cash for a pot of basil, let alone a garden-centre habit. Gardening is expensive in anyone’s language.
I could do it all myself. My now-adult boys are abroad and/or working full- time. But that is back-breaking and soul-destroying to us impatient people. Everything but weeds takes so darn long to grow. I’m physically lazy and would rather be inside by the fire, on a sofa with a book. And, even if I did tackle it alone, without teeth-rattlingly expensive help, I would still have to fork out arms and legs for gardening tools, plant pots, decking, gravel, turf, shrubs and roses. And before I had ‘finished’, I’d have to start all over again, like painting the Forth Bridge.
I love and appreciate a beautiful garden with the best of them. Most of my best friends are gardeners, amateur and pro.
But shoot me now – I’m with Kingsley Amis. I hate washing up – inside and outside.
