Anything we indulge ourselves in has the word “porn” attached to it nowadays. Salivating over online details of dream houses is property porn; films that wallow in economic misery are dismissed as poverty porn. Condé Nast Traveller magazine is holiday porn. So I suppose when I watch Gardeners’ World I’m enjoying a bit of gardening porn. Like other types of porn it involves an element of fantasy and make-believe, which can be both pleasurable and frustrating for viewers, as we turn from the herb parterres and the ornamental meadows on screen to survey the actual garden we have (if any).
Most of us don’t get the chance to garden like Monty. We have little suburban patches out the back: a rectangular lawn surrounded by narrow flower beds and an orange creosoted fence, where most of the gardening we do is mowing the grass and applying wood preservative. Or perhaps a “roof terrace”, which is just the flat roof of the bathroom below, lovingly reimagined as a tiny deck, where in a fit of enthusiasm over the Easter bank holiday weekend we filled pots with herbs and petunias, a heritage tomato plant and some organic basil, then watered for three weeks before abandoning to the elements when the weather turned.
Or we have a town garden, a tiny green oasis shaded by the towering houses on all sides, where the stone path coated in a layer of slimy green is a slippery death trap to anyone venturing out the back door.
These are the gardens we actually have, and there’s joy in making the best of them, hanging out nuts for the birds, planting lavender for the bees, coaxing some tiny little thing to grow, breeding lilacs out of the dead land.
I moved house three years ago, downsizing in the process, which was fine on the house front, but a bit heartbreaking in terms of the garden. I’d had a vegetable plot and a greenhouse and had become properly obsessed, writing a gardening column for a while called To the Greenhouse. Much harder than selling the old house, our home for ten years where the three kids did much of their growing up, was selling the greenhouse. The buyers looked at it with bewildered dismay. They were not gardeners and had no idea what to do with it. In my mind, I pictured broken windowpanes, weeds poking through the gravel, rust gradually eating into the frame, and finally the whole thing being razed to the ground. This has in fact happened. My greenhouse is now dead.
I spent the first year at the new house watching the garden through slightly narrowed eyes, judging its every change and turn, awarding marks out of ten, deciding what to keep and what to lose. The first casualty was the pampas grass. I hate the stuff and there were two large ones in the front garden, so they got the chop. A couple of weeks later the Daily Mail ran an article informing us that two pampas grass in the front garden was the secret sign that swingers lived here.
Given that we had bought the house from friends, I consigned this “fact” to a small compartment at the back of my mind, where it sits and looks at me while I ignore it, LALALALA I can’t hear you.
I’ve tried growing vegetables here, but without great success. A few lettuces in a perfect spot were fine till early summer, when the sycamore tree leaning over from next door dripped sticky goo on to them, a kind of unwanted and unappetising salad dressing. I did potatoes in bags – lovely early Charlottes, and the king of all potatoes, Golden Wonder, triumphant as any potato must be when it has a brand of crisps named after it.
But as time has gone by I’ve accepted the limitations and stopped trying to make this space something it isn’t. I’ve made my peace with my patch, and realised that I couldn’t be without gardening, wherever I lived. There’s a kind of blind optimism to it that I love. If I plant this here it will grow. The sun’s bound to shine. I’m sure those beans will germinate.
Every year experience gets in the way. Slugs eat the lettuces. Drought stunts the roses. The beans went in too early after all. But nothing stops us and we’re reborn every spring as gardening innocents, full of promise, sowing our seeds, undeterred.
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