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Mon 03 Mar 2010Planting seeds of doubt about gardening
IT IS a terrible thing when you lose faith in gardening. It is particularly terrible to lose faith in gardening in these troubled times, when more than 90 per cent of the Irish middle class remain attached, both intellectually and emotionally, to a horticultural orthodoxy that foreign observers find extraordinary.
Gardening is thought be the fount of all virtue; instructions are issued each weekend in the newspapers. Vegetable growing is taken as evidence – the only necessary evidence – of thrift, of good character and of good taste.
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