Oh, it may appear to the uninitiated that gardeners are patient. How else do we wait so long for a seed to grow into a sprout and a sprout to grow large enough to produce a tomato? Who else can play a long game and plant a tree today knowing that it won’t provide shade enough to host a teddy bear picnic for at least another decade?
Yet, I still stand by my statement — gardeners ARE NOT patient people.
Nowhere is this more evident than in a new garden, particularly a new ornamental or cutting garden. All too often, in an effort to make the garden look full and established, small perennials are planted nearly on top of their neighbor.
“I have a brown thumb,” Jan said apologetically, “I mean, it’s so bad that even silk flowers curl up and die.”
The rose bush I had planted a few weeks earlier was dropping its leaves and looking a bit yellow, but it wasn’t dead. I knelt beside it and dug my fingers into the soil. The roots were still firm and there was no sign of slime. We weren’t too late.
I smiled at Jan in an attempt to put her at ease. She had hired me because she had always dreamed of being a gardener, but she didn’t know the first thing about gardening. My job wasn’t just to install plants, it was also to teach her how to garden.
“You don’t have a brown thumb, just a heavy hand with the watering can.” I couldn’t help but chuckle, “You’re loving this poor rose to death!”
I was wading knee deep through the fallen soldiers in a wasteland of death. The skeletal remains of heather, a sword fern, and countless other shrubs and perennials that could no longer be identified crunched underfoot.
Someone, in the not-too-distant past, had tried to eradicate a horsetail problem by dousing the entire garden border with a broad-spectrum herbicide. The only living things that remained were the prehistoric green fronds of the horsetails themselves.
I levered my spade underneath one of the heather remains and pushed it upward. A frantic squeaking accompanied the severing of the plant’s roots. I quickly stepped back and surveyed the scene before me.
With the heather gone, I could clearly see a small burrow with a lining of soft brown and white fur sticking out.
26 years ago Irvine Welsh’s Choose Life Monologue from his book Trainspotting made it’s movie debut:
“Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves.”
And, like so many before and after me, that’s exactly what I set about doing.
Although Welsh was writing about the heroin epidemic destroying Edinburgh, these words perfectly sum up the American dream that was piped into my house via Friday Night Laugh Packs and Saturday Morning Cartoons throughout my 1980s childhood. It was the same dream, now upsized, that was sold to my parents in the decades following the wars that DIDN’T end all wars.
Jenny Wren 