We’re all agreeing that our gardens are looking splendid, like a spoiled children when big sibling is off at scout camp or has been sent away to boarding school. Every care, every treat possible has been lavished: fertilizer, weeding between the paving stones, regular watering, dead heading. Lawn edges have been clipped with nail scissors, tiny chickweeds removed with tweezers, the slightest drooping twig tied lovingly to the trellis. These are the horticultural equivalents of removing nose hair or cleaning the cuticles.
I read once that every Englishman has a deeply implanted fantasy of living in the country with a thatched cottage and hollyhocks in the garden. I suspect this is not true of the modern Englishman, especially when he has a quotation for insurance on a thatched cottage and realises that the take-away doesn’t deliver to Little Dribbling, as Bill Bryson names the archetypal English Village. The modern Englishman might well be a woman anyway. But the lockdown has enabled us, or even forced us, to indulge our very English fantasy of being a gardener. Some years ago when out walking I encountered a farmer leaning on his gate, as farmers always do in children’s stories. Because I had overheard an edition of ‘The Archers’ I was able to engage with him very learnedly on the subject of lambing. It was a good feeling to imagine myself at one with this tiller of the soil. No doubt he regaled his fellow farmers with tales of this ridiculous towny he had met, but we all like to feel we belong to the countryside, that we could give cultivatiing our own plot a bit of a go.
The lockdown has enabled a lot of us to imagine that we are gardeners and to try our hands at wielding a trowel or a pair of loppers. When we’re out walking we see our fellow fantasists with clean gardening gloves, sponge pads to kneel on and immaculate secateurs, newly arrived from Amazon. They remind me of the vicar’s wife or Lady Muck in ‘Midsomer Murders’ or someone in ‘Brideshead Revisited’ who is cutting roses in her patterned summer frock, wide brimmed hat tied with a ribbon under her chin while Smith, the gardener, stands respectful in the background with his apron, rickets and spade. It was he who spread the muck that made the roses grow but he is paid to be deferential and collude with the mistress of the house’s illusion that she does the gardening. Remember the Queen showing Sir David Attenborough her trees in Buckingham Palace Garden.
The lockdown has prevented us from indulging in our usual extreme sports, like wingsuiting or freestyle snowboarding. A GP friend once told me that she has more patients with gardening injuries than any other activity. Gardening is rough and dangerous; it should be classified as an extreme sport. Think of septic splinters and rose thorns, aching backs and slipped discs, banged heads and concussion, red ant stings and anaphylactic shock, scraped knees, twigs in the eye. Think of the foes: slugs, black spot, white fly, green fly, drought, bind weed, Japanese knotweed. Think of turning over the compost, digging in the horse manure, shifting rocks, pulling dead and decaying frogs out of the pond; jobs that may have to be done in the cold and wet.
Today I’ve been crawling around under low branches on very hard stony ground with bare knees tearing out wild strawberries with my bare hands and trying to fork out deep-rooted dandelions. Does Lady Muck have broken nails, ingrained earth in her skin and cuts on the backs of her hands? Of course not!
I started my blog at the end of March by trying to replicate Thoreau by Walden Pond. I would be observing the minutiae of the buds and the bees, of the ice melting and the birds building their nests. I would be out there with the axe ruggedly chopping logs and building walls. I am reminded too of W,B.Yeats, with his ideal of being locked down on Innisfree where “peace comes dropping slow.” Locked down oldies like me have enjoyed that experience of peace dropping slow lately. Now I taught Yeats’s poetry for many years, have visited many of his locations in western Ireland and used to know a lot about him. His romantic vision is entrancing and penetrates that longing in many of us, while we...”stand on the roadway, or on the pavement grey.” But I can never imagine Yeats, with the company he kept, ever having dirt under his exquisitely manicured nails. He may well fantasise about,
“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there”
And it’s at this point I begin to have my doubts whether Yeats could have built a cabin or plant nine bean rows and go on to rhapsodise about the slugs decimating the tender shoots.
This leisure time and this weather have granted us all the space to fantasise, to imagine our gardens aglow with Chinese lanterns, champagne on the terrace, Mediterranean breezes whispering in the palm trees, maybe a classical grotto or boathouse. Not confined to city apartments we’ve had the permission to luxuriate in our gardens, to plan, to plant, to learn, to enjoy, to move a little way towards our dream. We haven’t just had to toil and sweat in a rushed hour at the weekend. Many of our romantic notions of a garden have been fulfilled and I hope we’ll continue to dig and weed and water long after lockdown has finished, into the winter, into next spring.
I was struck by a quotation from Audrey Hepburn, who after all has a local connection as she once wore a sweater in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ made at Smedleys factory in Lea Bridge: “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.”
And that’s the point. When gardening, we are always looking beyond, conscious of what we sow today we will reap next year, or next decade. I hope that when we wander into our gardens next spring we will enjoy the result of what we did during these tiresome months. The shrubs we’ve put in and tended, the bulbs, the brassicas, the pruning, the spring plants we’ve removed and potted on to replant in the Autumn – all these are our strongest statement of faith that we and whatever small acreage of the natural world we can control,intend to flourish into the post viral future.