I have to confess, I really do not enjoy gardening. Our garden isn’t massive but everything grows so vigorously it’s a never enduring endurance battle against the greenery. We are beset by vigorous brambles, high-speed ivy, thistles, docks, and strange lush plants which are so thick I think I ought to get a machete to deal with them. We have a lawn at the front and another at the back which need regular mowing – I think we have undergrounds streams and water courses so the grass is always lush and grows almost before our very eyes. We have a double side gate which leads to the garage and on the other side of the drive from the house is an area in which we created raised beds for vegetables. Now that there’s usually just the two of us, we can’t possibly consume the amount of vegetables which could be produced, so we have tried to convert one to a rose garden. This was a huge mistake. The roses loved our soil, enjoyed the underground streams and followed the lawn’s example of growing swiftly and wildly, full of leaf but barely any flowers. I prune them, I hack them back, but they have sent up shoots elsewhere and are out of control. The other three beds are now just full of greenery – when there were vegetables growing insects loved them more than we did which was just as well because we couldn’t have eaten any more than we did. I made jams and pickles (some still stand on the shelves beneath the stairs) I froze them, I made soup and froze that too. In the end, I guess we also got lazy and gave up with the veg. Gardening to us is just a frustrating chore.
So today we grit our teeth, pulled on our gloves and went out to commence battle again. I notice that weeds are beginning to come up between the paving stones so I attack them with a sort of hacking blade and garden scissors. Worse still, little weeds are pushing through the tarmacced drive, which to be fair has been down for quite a while but I’m not sure we can afford to have it replaced. I pinch out as many of them as I can, and although we try not to use herbicides we do have one which is supposed to be creature friendly so I’m going to use that. Ivy and brambles have clambered over the fence and I attack as much of that as I can before it’s time for a cup of tea, knowing that tomorrow it will be nodding its tendrils over the top rail (as I believe its called.) I slash at the fleshy, flabby, cabbage-like things growing everywhere – I’m sure cutting them back encourages them to grow more but their roots are deep and persistent. I am stung, scratched, prickled, stabbed. I stop and go to make a cup of tea.
Meanwhile, husband is attacking the triffid-like mass of brambles, blackthorn, holly, elder and unnamed prickly things which are outside the fence but actually on our land. ‘Our land’ makes us sound like wealthy lairds – it’s actually a weedy strip about two-foot wide in which we originally planted roses. We were thinking they would be lovely, but they never flower despite careful pruning, and they have gone rampant. Husband does a sterling job attacking what might loosely be called a hedge, but as he is coming back into the garden, an errant briar catches his sleeve and wrenches the hedge trimmer out of his hands, it does a graceful loop and then smashes on the path.
Time for a cup of tea and then we set off to buy a replacement for the broken trimmer. I guess we’ll have to have another go tomorrow, with gritted teeth no doubt.
Lois Elsden 