Daft Old Duffer returns. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
The piece about the Footprint Trust last week has prompted memory of my own gardening misadventures.
Take a stroll around any leafy suburb and sooner or later, among the landscape of trimmed hedges, shaven lawns and highly disciplined rose bushes, you will stumble upon a garden seemingly neglected, a ruinous assembly of scruffy, sprawled-about bushes, luxuriant weeds and feral grass.
I’m not talking here about some plot on one of those sink-estates wherein are housed collectors of car-shells, defunct fridges and cat-smelling sofas. But of a well cared for dwelling, with windows as sparkly as any of its neighbours, yet set in a garden more resembling a slice of partially reclaimed jungle than anywhere folk wearing trousers might reside.
The Poison Thumb
If so you will have found the residence of a certain blighted people who, in sharp contrast to the celebrated green fingers of their more fortunate neighbours, are cursed with the dreaded and dreadful Poison Thumb.
People smile disbelievingly when I mention this affliction, preferring to ascribe unkempt plant growth to laziness or incompetence. Yet I know the awful truth, for I am myself the bearer of this merciless curse.
All my life the only result of my plantings, as with these other unfortunates, has been nothing but the exuberant flourishing of coarse grass and weeds.
Living proof
I first became aware that I was one of the afflicted when, as a newly wed, I moved with my bride into a little bungalow deep in the heart of Essex.
Faced with a piece of land never before subject to spade or fork, and with a bare two weeks before returning to sea, I set too manfully, armed with a thick gardening encyclopedia, a subscription to two gardening magazines and a ‘Neverbend’ fork.
Painstakingly I dug the entire area two spits deep, just like the experts recommended. Piling the slabs of earth up like rows of dwarf walls and rendering myself so ill in the process I had to take an extra week’s leave to recover.
And permanently deforming the ‘guaranteed never to bend’ Neverbend fork in the process.
Weed specialist
Several months later I returned from sea, ready to rake over and plant my plot of friable soil.
And was confronted by an area very similar to the scene I had encountered when first I strode out, wellington-booted and shiny tooled, to do battle.
The only difference lay in the fact that here and there were displayed a rather picturesque display of nasty looking puddles. Plus assorted clumps of healthy looking weeds.
I have always been able to grow weeds. And grass.
I didn’t give up
Not immediately. For the following few years I spent much of my sparse leave toiling grimly away. Yet while my neighbours slowly and methodically succeeded in making their portion of heaven into a Dingley-Dell, complete with gnomes and some veg at the back, I managed to produce only variations on the theme of hollyhocks, couch grass and man-hating briar.
Then, I took a shoreside job, and moved to a new house. A house previously occupied by a couple who were not only keen gardeners, but good at it.
I was handed a fully developed, picture perfect plot of lawn and flowerbeds that required only that I take reasonable care with the watering and mowing and weeding. Which with renewed hope, I meticulously did.
Within two years everything was dead. Or dying.
No hope
I do not know why. I was careful throughout to consult my garden-expert father in law, my equally gifted neighbours and my gardening magazines.
Nothing helped. Everything perished. Except for the grass that greedily spread itself overall.
And of course, the weeds.
Naturally I was despised by everyone – not excluding the wife – as a layabout who not only couldn’t be bothered with the simplest of gardening care, but was prepared actively to destroy previously nurtured beauty.
Slayer of loved lavender
A view not helped by the swift demise of the lavender hedge that lined the front of the property.
It had long been the habit of neighbours to enjoy the scent of this lavender hedge as they passed by, reaching over and rubbing their finger and thumb along a sprig.
My father-in-law advised me however that the hedge was dangerously overgrown. That the plants were so tightly entwined they were on the point of strangling themselves out of existence.
I took his advice, carefully following his instructions as when where and how to prune away the excess and let in some much needed air
Within a few weeks, the lavender was as defunct as if I’d sprayed it with weed killer.
Garden vandal
Nobody actually threw bricks through my windows, but the general attitude towards me was palpable.
I was a vandal, a deliberate, vicious destroyer of all things beautiful and worthwhile.
I moved again. This time to a Victorian residence fronted by flower beds. The previous owner had been as neglectful as everyone thought I was, and everything was overgrown and bushy.
Putting my demons to rest
Something had to be done. But I had learned my lesson. Being advised that Nasturtiums were not only colourful but had the enviable quality of flourishing everywhere – a bit like weeds in fact – I decided to major on them. I even went a bit mad.
Wanting to somehow make recompense for all the plant life I had massacred I not only filled the beds with them, I even purchased some planting troughs to line the low roof of an extension.
Thus, in my dreams finally putting my demons to rest.
Hired hands
I even took the precaution of not touching the plants myself. Instead employing someone else – a seasoned digger and weeder and planter – to lay everything out.
The only result was the slow and reluctance appearance of one, sick flower too heavy for its pallid yellow stalk to support and which drooped over ’til the flower head lay on the soil. And there perished, alone and unhealthy.
My baleful presence was clearly enough.
Plenty of grass though. And weeds.
So I toiled through the years, moving from home to home as I changed jobs, got promotion, divorced my long suffering wife (not so much because she disliked me, more she yearned to go out to the shops without being surrounded by nudges and whispers.)
And left in my sorry wake a string of destroyed flowerbeds, bare straggly grass and hedges no self respecting bird would go near.
All came good in the end
Yet now, at last, in my old and serene years I stand at the window of my first floor home and gaze out over my garden with a feeling of great satisfaction.
It is a perfect ‘countryman’s’ garden, the beans flowering nicely, the plot that nurtured the potatoes levelled ready for the next planting, the onions growing tall, the salads flourishing.
A plot of which any market gardener would approve.
It is a result I have achieved by at last discovering the sure route to vegetable perfection. At least for me.
Which is that I resolutely refuse to go anywhere near the place.
My Footprint hero
Instead the Footprint Trust found for me a man living in a bungalow surrounded only by communal gardens he is not permitted to touch.
A man who has only to regard the surliest of patches with a his stern and commanding eye for the straying grass to marshal itself in its proper place and grow up tidily, for plants to behave themselves, and for bushes to cease their straggling
And made my garden his. My only stipulation being that I have nothing whatever to do with it. Not even to the extent of receiving a proffered lettuce.
Even now, contemplating the scene from the distant safety of my window, I am careful to remain concealed behind the curtains.
For am sure one sighting of my peering eye will be enough to send all that lovely growth into a spiral of decline unto death.
