Learning to Grow

Starting, as always, with a raft of excuses: March 25th 2020.

I always felt I *should* have been a gardener. I love the idea of pootling around in the dappled sunshine, watching things grow and thinking: I did that. I love the image of putting home-grown produce on the table and murmuring 'From the garden, dahling', to impressed guests. And my mother (of whom, much more later and throughout) had fingers so green she could've been a career gardener, if anyone wanted one who was knowledgeable, but entirely inflexible and irascible.

Why not, then? I have the space at the back of the house. In fact when we moved here, when my children were very young, the garden was one of the selling points. We viewed it at around this time of year when clumps of daffodils brightened the bleak spots and aubretia the deep purple of a Cadbury's wrapper tumbled over the walls. My mother sucked her teeth and pointed out it was on something of a steep slope, and as I usually did in those days, I ignored her.

So, Excuse Number 1, right there. It's on a steep upward slope.

How did I not spot this? As the kids grew up it turned out to be a singularly useless space for play and outdoor sessions (apart from a brief fling with a netted trampoline) meant a trip to the park or beach. And physically mowing the grass is a task that proved beyond me. My partner Mark ended up with that little job, and he really hates gardening.

Excuse Number 2.

So we let the garden get a bit neglected. And then it got harder and harder to deal with. Just because you ignore a garden doesn't mean it stays the same. It wilfully gets weedier and filthier and more awkward to fix. Now it's what my son would call a hot mess.

Excuse Number 3.

I was busy! I was bringing up kids and working full time and studying for a PhD and trying to follow my other dream of being a published novelist. Where in all that was I supposed to find time for digging and sowing? Add to that the fact that I've never been particularly outdoorsy: I'd rather be leafing through pages of a book than leafing through - er - leaves. I'm quite happy to fanny about for hours in front of the bathroom mirror and as a good old-fashioned leftie I've been horrified, in these constricted times, to face up to my shopping addiction.

Excuse Number 4.

We all know about the road to hell. Let me tell you what it's actually paved with, in my case: gardening books. I have shelves full of them, each one attached to a New Year's resolution or other form of good intention. Some of them are inherited (my mother), but most were bought in a bout of misguided optimism.

I am particularly drawn to titles like The Ten Minute Gardener, or The Impatient Gardener, or Transform Your Garden Without Doing Very Much At All. They all proved useless, in that they didn't actually do the work for me.

And all the while, that view from the kitchen window has nagged at me.

Maybe it doesn't look at that bad in this pic. But that's because you're not up close. When I go and sit outside, when the weather allows, all I see are the weeds, the bare patches, the broken things and the piles of general crap. It's not therapeutic and it's not nice.

Enforced capitivity

But: here I am, like everyone else, in lockdown. That gives me at least two hours a day when I am not sitting on a train and trolling the train companies about their appalling service. I can't go far, but I can go out there. So here's another good intention to add to my growing pile: over the next few weeks, I'm going to make that wretched garden nice. Quite literally, watch this space.