The last time I wrote about my shambolic back garden, an internet algorithm meant that the headline began popping up in the middle of other pieces of Guardian writing. “My Ugly Scrappy Plot Smacks of Personal Failure” showed up midway through another article I’d written about menopause. Below the line, comedians from Cardiff to Canberra suggested lubricating pessaries and vajazzles.
This did little to help my sadness. The plot just north-east of my kitchen still resembled somewhere Nasa could stage a fake moon landing. And I still feared that time had got the better of me when it came to gaining green thumbs. I’d worked day and night for years to live in a home with space to grow things, and by my mid-40s that meant I had missed any opportunity to tell a petunia from a black-eyed Susan. Time had been against me almost every weekend since 2010, when tending to life admin overtook any urge to read about acidic top soil or study the “Chelsea chop” or how to mulch a bush. Time, time, time. I never had it.
But then Covid-19 came and time, in my home at least, slowed into a sticky, trudging fog. March slid into April peppered by questions such as, “Have I eaten today or was that yesterday?”, and “Is it really fair to agree to push a nasopharyngeal swab this far into an 83-year-old man’s head, when dementia means he doesn’t even know there’s a pandemic?” Also, “Before I worked this hard all the time, what did I actually want, and will I ever go back to that way of life?” Somewhere around this stage I looked out of the window and noticed rosebuds growing.
“The rose bush on the far left-hand side is about to bloom, I think,” I told my bloke Charles via WhatsApp. We were staying apart – theoretically – to keep me uninfected. “But there’s a frightening knotweed strangling the bush. And the pyracantha has gone feral: it’s all black and vicious at the bottom like something from a Grimms’ fairy tale.” I found clippers and gloves and began gingerly pruning. Soon after that, I was defiantly lopping.
The pyracantha fought back, attacking me several times with its spikes. But as the pile of clippings grew, the pain felt curiously positive. OK, this is why people get into gardening, I realised. Pulling up weeds in the paving, I found, feels satisfying, like squeezing pimples. Adding a capful of stinky fertilising liquid to a sad geranium basket and waking up one morning to new shoots felt nothing short of a holy miracle.
One week later, an old half-dead strawberry plant I’d chucked water at began to flourish. Then, incredibly, it grew berries, and soon long, green spindly stalks that a helpful man on a YouTube channel in Illinois explained were “runners” to nurture new plants. By this point, I was fully evangelical. “Next year,” I told people excitedly, “I’ll have a whole row of strawberry plants!” The roses on the now emancipated bushes began to bloom in a shade of vibrant New Romantic pink that I once bought a C&A snood in. Nothing in the world was OK, I accepted; but there would be a next year in the garden.
Now, as we slide into autumn, I should underline that I don’t have remotely the garden I dreamed of when I bought it in 2005. The one I’d hoped to grow one day, when time allowed, was a charmingly curated plot with a honeysuckle-draped trellis, coordinating hardy perennials, a verdant green Wimbledon-style lawn, buoyant fig trees and a pretty Heals garden set, where I’d drink pastis in a wide-brimmed hat.
Instead, what I’ve achieved is some randomly chucked grow bags with rows of higgledy-piggledy radishes. Bags planted with Pink Fir Apple potatoes sit beside pots of coriander. Some tall sedums I planted grew wildly, then fell over under their own weight. A bag of tasteful wildflower seed that I scattered fetched up nothing more than dandelions and clover, which cheer me up each time I look at them. “I’ve grown designer weeds,” I tell people proudly.
When lockdown relaxed, I joined the queue at B&Q to buy their most tasteful terracotta pots, surrounded by other socially distancing amateur gardeners. The shelves of seedling compost and perlite were ransacked. I bought some bigger, more terrifying loppers, determined to tame the hedge at the front that had begun ensnaring the postman. I bought hanging baskets full of fuchsias, pinched them back, fed them, transforming the curb appeal of my house to emit “genteel lady in control of her life” rather than “woman planning to die alone surrounded by cats”. I even had a little shufty through some seed and bulb pre-order catalogues.
Monty Don will never broadcast from my garden on a Friday evening; in fact, I think he would sit in the corner and have a little plaintive weep. But I don’t care. My small successes, in the face of so much sadness, make me very happy. Time has begun moving vaguely forwards. My ugly scrappy plot still smacks of personal failure, but I wouldn’t change a thing.
