Gardening is Wrong

I am not a gardener by nature. It�s not that I kill plants, but rather that I have no interest whatsoever. Don�t find it therapeutic, relaxing or anything other than annoying.

I suspect that I just don�t have the gardening gene. And the aversion was undoubtedly driven along by growing up on a large piece of land which required lots of upkeep just maintain its natural bush-like state, by my mother�s love of gardening and constant raving about it and spending all her spare time doing it even when it means that she�s over-tired and sore, and by my general leaning towards inside pastimes such as reading, writing and watching TV.

Growing up when we divided up the household chores I volunteered for all the inside ones, including cleaning the whole house, provided I didn�t have to do the gardening. As a result I have never even mowed a lawn. Boofhead got to do that.

Not that he was or is the gardening king. Famously our mother went overseas for five weeks in the middle of summer right after I finished high school. I am so not into gardening that I didn�t even think about the garden I was meant to be looking after until the day before she came home and one of my friend�s mothers pointed out all the dead plants to Boofhead and I. Twenty-four hours of solid watering wasn�t going to fix this problem. As a result my first words to Mum on picking her up from the airport after a 24 hour flight were �I killed all you plants and I need a car because of the university I�ve decided to go to�.

Not a gardening person.

Since leaving home I have lived in apartments with no plant-life whatsoever, a large Edwardian with a very nice garden, including a lawn and a gardener paid for by the landlord, a terrace house with a tiny paved yard and a creeper over the back fence that didn�t need any tending, and my current house.

The current house has a pretty decent sized yard for an inner-city terrace. It�s mainly paved with bricks, with large garden beds all the way around, and a giant nectarine tree in the centre. No lawn. Instead a history as a chicken run on a larger property � or so the legend goes � which means it is extremely well fertilized and the plants, weeds and anything else you might think of, grow like crazy. Particularly in the Spring.

Me, not a gardener. Previous house-mates during my tenure � not gardeners. Betty, periodic gardener. Periodic in that she occasionally gets a burst of energy to plant something pretty and then forgets about it again. If its in the ground and strong enough against the weeds it survives. If its not strong enough or is in a pot it dies.

So generally the garden gets ignored except about now, when the weather is just getting good enough to start thinking about barbeques and the weeds are at their dominating late-Spring peak. We have tackled this in various ways over the years I have been in the house. The first year (or perhaps two) I think we just ignored it totally. Thus when the third year came around there was a weed forest rather than a garden. We bribed my mother and several friends to help clean it up that year.

The last two years we�ve got a gardening person in to do the whole lot. The landlord has generously paid. The combined effort of these three years means that it has never again reached forest level. But it does get out of control.

The weather was very pleasant on Saturday. Sunny but not too hot. Around lunchtime I started feeling restless. The writing wasn�t happening, not least because I needed a break from looking at a computer screen for any reason. I didn�t really want to go for a walk because I�d just end up in town spending money. So I, stupidly, decided to head into the back yard and pull out the largest of the weeds and rescue Betty's lavender from the strange strangling plant which showed up in the garden this year even though it has never been seen there before.

Once I started I was making pretty decent progress and just kept going. I got a lot done in a relatively short period of time. After taking time out for a lunch break, I really only think I was out there about two and a half hours. It did feel satisfying. Until sometime later in the evening when I�m sitting in the cinema watching the delightful George Clooney and my back, along the waistband of my jeans, starts to feel irritated. Couldn�t even see what it was until I got home, by which point I was concerned that I�d been bitten by something or brushed up against something I was vaguely allergic too. I already had a series of small scratches and allergic welts on my forearms, but that was understandable. The back wasn�t.

Until I looked in the mirror. At the strip of sunburn across by lower back where my t-shirt had ridden up while I was crouching and pulling weeds. Now the rest of me is not burned, tanned or in any other way coloured by the sun, so I hadn�t even thought about my back during the day. I was informed later than Betty had considered this a potential problem when she came home to find me gardening, but did she mention it? No.

And all this was made worse when getting up to go to Yum Cha on Sunday morning. Sore butt and hamstrings.

Gardening is wrong. And far, far more trouble than its worth. Next year I�m going to fight even the slightest impulse to pull any weeds and call the gardener immediately.

Though at least I feel like I got a work-out.