The Side-Eye on the dark side of gardening

Like many other midlife women, gardening is a relatively new area of interest, and only since the enforced stay-at-home time has it become a fully-fledged passion. Let me tell you, my garden – front and back, window boxes, herb pots, we’re not even counting the houseplants – looks amazing.

Look with wonder on the swathes of colour flowing one into the next, the hopeful seed-scattering of early March come good. Fill your baskets in the greenhouse full of tomatoes and cucumbers. Heads turn as walkers pass by and evening drinks are enhanced by wonderful fragrances. People have started asking me about cuttings.

I never really knew where to begin with gardening. Years of flat shares where I was far more interested in going out rather than pottering about at home were followed swiftly by the open prison of life with small children. After a day of enhancing young brains and wiping young bottoms, I had interest in tending more than the odd dutiful pot plant, all of which invariably died.

And anyway, where to start with gardening? The names are all in Latin and who has the time to test the Ph of their soil? And how do you know what to do? I always loved garden centres, but much in the same way that I love bookshops in foreign countries; beautiful covers but no idea about what’s inside. I’d go on occasional gardening sprees, busy myself digging and chopping and planting. But there was no method to it, no understanding and so the results were inevitably disappointing.

So what changed? A lot of time and effort. Turns out that losing most of your work and being at home with your family around the clock is the ideal gardening kickstarter. When the four walls were closing in, I’d go outside. If I was seen at rest, I’d be asked to provide food or education or entertainment, so I busied myself gardening. I spent four hours a day gardening from mid March until mid June. I’ve got permanent mud under my nails, a farmer’s tan and an absolutely beautiful garden to show for it.

Thing is, once life goes back to normal – when the children are at school again and I am busy with work, and when there is no need to keep the creeping anxieties and fears about the world at bay by pinching out tomatoes, I won’t have four hours a day to spend on my herculean amateur Chelsea Garden show. To know how lovely it can be when a great effort is made is salutary and is testimony that hard work brings the biggest rewards. But next year’s overgrown, slightly unkempt garden will also remind me about how lucky I am to have the comforting rhythms of normal life making demands on my time.

Being able to move about freely will take me away from this garden of delight that has also been our gilded cage.

In the last few months, we have had to make time, and fill our time with the sorts of stubborn activities that simply require large amounts of time. Sourdough starters, 1000 piece jigsaws or gardening – there’s no shortcuts to be had. The picture-perfect Instagram shot of your ‘tablescapes’ or veg patch no longer triggers life envy and status anxiety. Rather it tells us that the photographer might have been going through a hard time alleviated only by some intensive napkin folding or radish-pricking. Regular, blissful normal life is busy and messy and unkempt. From now on, we should all view anything too perfect with healthy suspicion. The effort that it has taken is unsustainable and unseen. So when you see that the weeds are back and the dahlias are no longer manicured to perfection, breathe easy. All will be well.

Jennifer Coyle, June 2020.