by Elizabeth Shaheen
The other day, whilst engrossed in writing an article, the sky became heavy with cloud and the room darkened with the promise of pending rain.
In fact, it was a big fat black promise of imminent rain. I shut down my computer and dashed into the garden, making a beeline for the cloche nursing my lavender cuttings. These, for sometime now, I had been meaning to separate and pot-on. It had suddenly occurred to me that this might be an opportune moment to plant them out in the garden.
Each grow-bag held around six to eight cuttings all beautifully rooted. In fact, it was a miracle that they hadn’t killed one another off, for there was little, if any, root-space remaining in the compost.
How I plead for more time in my day, especially now that the evenings have drawn in.
As they were so well endowed with root, this indeed was an opportune moment to set them in the ground and let the wonderful rain water them in well.
As I was planting them out thunder roared, the skies opened and a deluge befell the garden and needless to say me.
I became absolutely soaked to the skin. Normally, I enjoy working in the rain, as it’s such a luxury here.
But on this occasion, it was so hard and fast that I quickly got all the plants in the ground, prayed aloud that they wouldn’t be flattened by morning and made a reverse beeline to the house, with Tilly the cat close to heel.
Only the day before I had mused over why any sane person should want to take up gardening.
It had been a long day of hard labour attending to one long-suffering garden task after another.
My back was completely all in by the end of it.
To do gardening well requires, first and foremost, time, followed by dexterity, experience (which only comes with practice), understanding, doggedness and a degree of vigour and providence. Added to which, all forms of vanity go out of the window.
My arms bear a network of scars caused over the years from pruning the mean-thorned plants in the garden.
My hands find their way behind my back when I’m talking to non-gardening people, for only true gardeners would be sympathetic to the state of my hands.
And the numerous times, when in a tired state, rather than prune the plant-stem in hand I instead unwittingly attempt to amputate my finger.
I should hate to count the times I have slid into a prepared planting hole or caught my hair into a tangled mess in a branch of a tree.
I often wonder too, why when a few gardeners are gathered together what causes the irrational rivalries to echo over the rational reassuring knowledgeable conversation.
Surely, our constant struggle against the forces of nature should make us comrades-in-arms.
I am perplexed as well as to why we are led so easily by the current in-vogue gardening styles.
It is subject to the same requisites and whims as in-vogue trends in clothes, which both in all likelihood lightens the purse without fulfilling the soul.
A frequent pastime involves searching the garden nurseries for a plant, or plants, out of the ordinary, to try to persuade nature’s hand to permit their survival.
Rather than growing plants from seed, we part with our hard earned cash, for we lack the time, energy or patience to nurture our wants from seed or cuttings.
Many of us look out for the latest time-saving tool, be it a lawnmower, a garden vacuum cleaner or a garden shredder to help hurry along the compost heap.
All that’s needed really is for the Japanese to invent along with their squad of robots, rather than the latest robotic, potential, television presenter – a robotic gardener.
On second thoughts, that would render us gardeners soulless.
I took leave from this confessional and walked out into the garden to see what new sprouts had emerged from my previous saunter of a mere hour before.
As I returned, I realised that this mysterious pull that nature has over a true gardener’s will, must be much more than the magnetism of exquisite flowers or the joy of seeing one’s artistic designs evolve and fill out.
Even more than the promise of the flower concert to come in spring from the annuals and perennials sown from seed.
But rather it must be some prehistoric instinct that necessitates us to scratch in the sweet-smelling earth and create something transient but eternally fulfilling out of nothing, for that’s how our garden evolved, save for a few date palms.
Now, as I write, a gale-force wind is brewing and visions of fallen trees by morning has rendered me panic-stricken.
Fortunately, earlier I staked the gladiolus and placed unobtrusive sticks and twigs to support the freesia. I had saved some branch twigs from gifts of flower arrangements for that purpose.
The towering-flowering cleomes also have their necessary support. Anything I have missed will be rendered a horizontal state very soon.
In spite of the above I reassert here my conviction that there is no truer fact of life other than gardening, and the people who practice it are part of life’s rich fabric and there, inherently lies the enjoyment of it albeit, at times, utterly frustrating.
Elizabeth Shaheen – GDN – 7 Jan, ’07