It’s all very depressing. In the brief intervals of sunshine between the sleet showers, the neighbours in our road are out in their gardens making good the depredations of winter – sweeping and sluicing, trimming and tidying and pointing out with pride to random passers-by that their crocuses are coming up.
I take only an academic interest. I weed not, neither do I sow. Neither indoors nor out am I any hand at growing things. Not only do I not have green fingers, I seem to be cursed with the power to emanate horticultural death-rays from my eyes alone. I could annihilate Japanese knotweed with a single glance. Friends have gifted me with the hardiest of indoor and outdoor plants which have the reputation of being well-nigh indestructible and I’ve managed to kill them with kindness or let them die of benign neglect.
I do not concur with the poet who proclaimed ‘a garden is a lovesome thing God wot’. Untended since the man came to do the last lawn cut of the season in October, mine is anything but kempt. Swathes of sodden autumn leaves lie congealed like patches of brown linoleum over the grass. I’m waiting for them to decompose naturally, much comforted by reading somewhere that ‘Nature is self-cleansing’.
Since the recent heavy rain has effectively power-washed most of the moss off the drive, I’m inclined to believe it.
Friends envy my garden’s generous size and wonder why I don’t do more with it. I put forward the limp defence of blaming “acid soil and poor drainage”. (I’ve no idea if such is actually the case, but it sounds convincing.) The truth is, I’d sooner rear another child than tend a garden. It’s less labour-intensive.
I seem to have missed out on the gardening gene. My father won the NI Schools Horticultural Cup for a garden in the windswept and wuthering foothills of the Sperrins, though my mother frequently observed with some asperity that he got the cup and she got pneumonia – at death’s door and the priest called for.
When they moved to the city she created a garden in a concrete backyard. She had the touch – could stick a bunch of shop-bought carnations in six inches of poor soil and they rooted. When the Loving Spouse and I built our house, we inherited on the plot some well-established shrubs – rhododendron, lilac, mock orange and several whose names I never discovered and are referred to still as ‘the pink thing’, ‘the yellow thing’ and ‘the purple thing with berries on it’. In a unwonted burst of energy and enthusiasm I planted honeysuckle and clematis. The Loving Spouse in a fit of abstraction mowed the infant creepers into the ground.
In an excess of zeal we got a man to put in an oak, a mountain ash, a copper beech, a sycamore, a silver birch and a eucalyptus, which shot up like a rocket and the Electricity Board came out to complain we were endangering their wires. Daughter Dear pleaded for a tree of her very own, so we put in a maple. It died – as did, in quick succession, its replacements, a cherry, a magnolia and a laburnum. She took it personally.
We looked upon the work of our (hired) hands and saw that it was good. We dusted our hands and thought, “That’s enough.” But we forgot about the conservatory, an aspirational architectural afterthought built into the roof. What a faff! Pots, compost, seeds and seedlings, plant-food and every drop of water lugged up a spiral staircase to the heat and blinding glare of a summer’s day or the piercing cold of a winter’s one. “Your department,” stated the Loving Spouse firmly. I persevered for nearly a year. Then we went on a summer holiday and returned to a fossilised forest of blackened stalks. That finished it. We put a solid roof on it, installed vertical blinds, a couple of sofas, books and a radio. Daughter Dear appropriately re-christened it ‘the huffing room’ and remarkably useful it became.
The only flowers in it now are on the duvet covers, drying nicely in the temperate heat.
