Tips for better gardening

Abraham Cowley, the 17th-century English poet and landscaping enthusiast, once declared, “I never had any other desire so strong and so like to covetousness as that one which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and large garden.”

Lest you think that I’m the sort of tiresome person who has an arsenal of such intelligence at the forefront of my brain, primed and ready for firing, let me assure you that this is not the case. I know about Cowley only because that quote regularly turns up in the many books about gardening that have come onto the market in recent times.

Gardening has always had its adherents, of course, but in the last decade or so it has really taken off as a middle-class recreation.

The publishing industry, with an eye to the bottom line, duly took note and cranked open the floodgates. Backyard gardening, balcony gardening, container gardening, rooftop gardening, guerrilla gardening in desolate corners of the inner city, turning salvaged toilet bowls into charming little gardens... Scan any of the tomes available and you’ll certainly find the Cowley quote. If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a dozen times.

But none of the writers mentions how the fellow died, at age 49, of a gardening-related illness. Working outside in the evening chill, he caught the cold that became the spreading contagion that did him in.

Why this selective omission? Obviously all these volumes have been published with the purpose of fostering the horticultural impulse. No-one wants to own up to the inconvenient truth – thank you, Al Gore – that gardening can be a perilous, even a fatal avocation. And that’s why I’m here.

Like Cowley, I aspired to have a small house. The one I got was equipped with a desolate yard in which gravel and quite a few used syringes had been plentifully sown. Friend after friend, as they came to marvel at my folly, would cast about for something redemptive to say. They’d remark, “Well, at least you’ll be able to have a nice little courtyard garden.”

None recalled that not a single houseplant ever survived my tutelage, that I was once knocked out of a spelling bee with the word photosynthesis or that, when the fad for talking to greenery came along in the ’70s, I would address my wilting philodendron with the telling phrase, “I live on coffee. You can, too.” No, all I heard was “little courtyard garden, little courtyard garden” over and over again. Somehow, I took it into my head that they might be right.

To my credit, I held enough self-knowledge in reserve to know that it was not a project I should undertake unaided. A gardener was engaged. He asked me a few questions about my dreams, my vision. I said, “Oh, you know. Some green things scattered around.”

“You’ll be needing something low-maintenance,” he said.

It took the better part of a summer to install and a whole winter’s worth of work to pay for, and then spring came round again, and things began to grow, and I was brought face to face with the understanding that what I’d required was not low maintenance but no maintenance. I have it on reliable authority that such a thing doesn’t exist in the world of gardening, but this intelligence dawned too late unfortunately.

Until the day I arrive home to find an angel with a flaming sword guarding the gate of my wee Eden, I’m stuck with the thing. Like it or not, it’s a learning experience. So here are ten small examples of the knowledge foisted on me —>