It was dry and sunny yesterday so I ventured into the garden. The house was empty apart from the baby who was asleep, so I had an hour to myself. Within five minutes I was hysterical with stress. I picked up the phone and rang my Auntie Sheila. She is my garden mentor, although most of the time she has a therapy role.
“There are weeds and dead grass and rubbish everywhere. I have lost my special gardening stool/kneeler. My herbs are overgrown and dead. My rhubarb patch is grown over, my vegetable patch has gone to lawn. I have six pairs of gardening gloves and they are all covered in mould – and yet I have no gardening tools apart from a children’s set whose plastic handles have just snapped off. All my seeds are two years past their sell by date. There are two tents from last summer in pieces all over the back fence. There are drifts of dead leaves in every corner, probably with dead foxes under them. Can I put dead leaves in the compost? Can I put dead foxes in the compost? I don’t know what’s in my pots. What will I do? Where will I start? Help! Me!”
Sheila, a keen gardener, attempts to calm me down. “You tackle the garden the same way to tackle everything – bird by bird – bit by bit – one hour at a time.”
It mystifies Sheila that I can undertake the daily discipline of writing novels and yet I cannot seem to master the twice weekly task of pinching out my tomato plants.
When she asked after my tomato plans this year I exclaimed, “Blasted triffids! They took over the whole tunnel and not one tomato!”
“What about in pots? One bush tomato plant in a pot – then take it from there.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head, opening the lid of my composter to study my un-composted compost, “I can’t do tomatoes any more. I put all that work into them…” I can hear her silent frustration coming down the line at me but I don’t care, “…then they let me down. I have to let go of them Sheila. They’re too painful. Tomatoes are out.”
She takes a deep breath and brings me onto a more positive note. “How’s your rhubarb?”
My rhubarb is my pride and joy. It never lets me down. I ignore and abuse it, but it keeps coming up, year after year, back for me. It is Rhubarb Who Loves Too Much.
“Flying,” I looked across at my hardy plants – pushing up from their unmade bed of old leaves and bits of escaped miscellaneous plastic from the miscellaneous bits-of-plastic dump behind the composter.
“I love my rhubarb,” I said wistfully, and for a moment, it seemed possible to garden.
“Do one thing now,” she said kindly, “then come back again tomorrow.
I walked over to my dried out lavender bush and shuddered at the state of my herb garden. It seemed like only last week that I was down on my hands and knees clearing leaves off the ground beneath these plants, weeding through to the black soil, crumbling it with compost, mulching it, for goodness sake. And now look at it! Of, course, it wasn’t a week ago, it was a year ago but surely, surely, it’s not possible that I have to do all that work again? Of course I do because – newsflash!- stuff grows in the garden. It’s not fair. Novels may take ages to write and longer again to edit, but once they are published you’re finished with them. With the wretched garden you have to keep coming back and doing the same thing, over and over, year after year, again and again and again. It’s not just a question of making it look nice. You have to go out there and keep it nice every day. For a completion junkie like me, somebody who likes to get the job done then wipe her hands and be done with it, gardening is a hellish occupation. And yet, for some reason, I am drawn to it.
I reached into the lavender and broke off a crisp flower head and rolled it between my fingers. It smelt exquisite and sweet. “Just do one thing,” Sheila had said.
I went into my office and found an old, cloth evening bag, then went out to the bush, stripped it of it’s dried flower heads and made myself a huge, luxurious lavender pillow. Then I sat with the scented package on my lap and contemplated a summer full of fresh air, and falling petals – some of the rewards of my labor would be enjoyed this summer, and others not until the next year. It takes work to renew a garden, but, as with everything else in life, it’s worth it.
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