Opinion

Anita Robinson: Keeping a garden under control is too much like hard work

Phlox, echinacea and delphiniums are long-flowering stars of the summer garden
Phlox, echinacea and delphiniums are long-flowering stars of the summer garden Phlox, echinacea and delphiniums are long-flowering stars of the summer garden

I forget which part of the Bible admonishes us, “as ye sow, so shall ye reap.” I feel bound to state that this may not always be the case.

I don’t subscribe to the philosophy that a garden is a lovesome thing, nor do I believe you’re nearer to God in a garden than anywhere else on earth – though one does overhear people communing with the Almighty whilst gardening, prefacing many of their remarks with the phrase, “Omigod!” muttered in fervent tones.

Once upon a time the Loving Spouse and I did subscribe obediently to the neighbourhood ethos when we first came to live here and wished to be socially accepted. You should’ve seen us out there, scrabbling in the soil and hacking at the greenery in the most amateurish fashion. We bought a hedge-trimmer and cut everything to stumps, then wondered why the lilac died. The neighbours stared and shook their heads as they passed the amputation ward that was our garden.

What exasperated us was the amount of time and energy it took for so little result. Each summer we seemed to be constantly on duty policing the verges, preventing weed incursions from the Drumcree hill of the rockery down the Garvaghy Road of the herbaceous border. Eventually, we stopped worrying what our neighbours thought, resigned from the police authority and let nature run riot. Of course, unless you hold nature back with a whip and a kitchen chair, it’ll take over again in the course of a wet weekend.

Up our back was a case in point. At great inconvenience and expense, we got a man to create a sloping greensward neatly planted with shrubs and bounded by a graceful crescent of sweet-smelling broom which shielded us equally from rampant nature and the neighbours. It was a second career Keeping it Kempt. Whins, nettles, brambles and bracken mounted annual attacks on us; moss invaded the grass and the shrubs disappeared under a creeping sticky-leaved menace tough as a paratroopers’ assault net. We fought back half-heartedly with puny plastic sprays of stuff that promised to reduce the Amazonian rain-forest to pathetic subjection with a single application. The weeds didn’t die. They mutated. We put in hardy climbers, like clematis and Virginia creeper. They neither climbed nor crept. After one season wrestling with the opposition they were quietly throttled.

“Go with the flow,” I thought, scattering several packets of wildflower seeds. Not so much as a dog-daisy reared its head. I never thought the word ‘burgeoning’ was imbued with menace, but if you took your eye off our back garden for a week, nameless green things, like John Wyndham’s triffids, came tapping at the windows with sly, tendrilled fingers, trying to get in. Over the years it morphed into an impenetrable thicket, encroaching leaf by leaf, threatening to smother us and obliterate all signs of civilization.

And then one day, quite by accident, we discovered the answer. The Loving Spouse burning garden waste, inadvertently set light to the whole jingbang. Flames leapt from shrub to shrub in an authentic Australian bushfire sort of way and the whins were incandescent and spitting. It was all rather beautiful and elemental.

However, the ‘scorched earth’ policy went down very badly with the neighbors who, unsportingly, called the fire-brigade and flocked to sympathise with our tragedy, only to find us cheerful and unrepentant. Surveying the fossilised landscape next day, severe misgivings smote us. Nothing will ever grow here again we thought. But of course it did. Imperceptibly the blackened earth greened, first with fronds of bracken, curled tender as babies’ fists, then with hazy drifts of bluebells and violets hidden in the damp places. And back with renewed vigour came our hardy sitting tenants – the sinewy whin, the steely-stemmed briar and the punk thistle with its purple Mohican.

And so the unequal struggle continues. This spring’s unusually warm and showery weather means the bracken alone has grown two feet high in a fortnight. The annual green tsunami is rolling inexorably towards the back door – and I’m looking out the window with a speculative hand on a box of matches.