Too much perfect gardening will do your head in

ANN MARIE HOURIHANE

Gardening has always been a ruthless business where the weak are crushed under foot. But the last 20 years have made it particularly merciless

THIS IS the week in which we are supposed to be washing our paths and patios with one of those high-pressure thingies, in case moss or algae get a hold. So it must be time for the annual (or perhaps perennial) anti-gardening column. It’s tradition. And best practice. And a long drive, these days, to a garden centre.

I shouldn’t be telling you this. I’m very busy. Or should be. I should be in the garden, putting a tomato plant in the ground. I should be clipping green shoots off variegated shrubs (as if...). I should be sowing some annual climbers – the cup and saucer vine, for one.

But, battered by failure, disillusion and sloth, I fell out of love with gardening some time ago. It was unfortunate timing. Just as I was hanging up my shovel and indeed, pace Christy Moore, trying to forget all about it, the rest of the country was tearing up its tree ferns to plant vegetables.

Nowadays when people talk about room outside they mean a 20ft polytunnel. (That’s where the tomato plant came from. I know it’s too early.) Some of the people I love best in the world, even relatives, are involved in this madness, and are dusting off their drip irrigation systems as we speak. So far my reaction to this hurtling snowball of productivity has been to buy more brightly coloured garden furniture. It has worked quite well so far. Also to buy my first commercial non-organic weedkiller. Yes, sad moment, etc.

There has been one edible success. Like most successes in gardening it was accidental and undeserved.

For the incompetent, the lazy and the just plain ignorant there are only three words: purple flowering broccoli. Plants thrown in the ground in the autumn, neglected, covered in snow, sailing through that second frost that pulverised so many other plants, and now cropping nicely. It’s cut and come again, is purple flowering broccoli. And it’s €4-something for six tiny strands of it in Marks & Spencer. A smugfest. (Note: broccoli plants grow big, to the size of large cabbages. Who knew?)

I have written before about my devoted gardener friend who gave up watching Gardeners’ World because it made her feel so inadequate. But I return to her because to me she is like the lifelong Irish soccer fans who don’t go to games anymore – an illustration of everything that is wrong with the game, Bill. Although gardening has always been a ruthless business in which the weak are crushed under foot, like so many aromatics amusingly planted between slabs, the last 20 years have made it particularly merciless. It is all that perfection laid out before us in full colour: enough to do your head in.

So when, last Friday, the viewing public was offered the chance to watch Monty Don sow annual seed into spring-warmed soil (I kid you not) on Gardeners’ World , I imagine there are quite a few of us who decided to give it a skip. As the only person I know to have read The Ivington Diaries (Monty’s book for Christmas 2009/10), I can tell you that Monty does nothing but garden all the time. No wonder he had a stroke.

Even when he’s away filming television programmes he has people who come in to do the garden for him; and he worries about it when he’s away.

He has a wife – who sounds very nice otherwise – who has had each one of a dozen yew or bay trees moved six inches to the left or to the right in order to make the planting scheme look better. Even Monty says he wouldn’t have the nerve to do that. But, he says, she’s always right, and that that six-inch move made all the difference.

Thanks to people such as Monty there is a real danger that the United Kingdom is going to vanish under the green wellington of good taste; luckily there is no such danger here. We only fall to bits when we try to get fancy. It was a bad day for Ireland when the olive trees arrived and the hydrangea fell out of fashion.

But never mind, this week we still can get to watch Monty purr his way round olive trees and bay trees in Monty’s Italian Gardens (Wednesday, BBC 2). What shall we call this: a pornbeam hedge? Or a lovely programme about something nice, for a change? Leaving Monty firmly to one side – and perhaps heeling him in to be used later in the year – we return to the old chestnut that gardening is the triumph of hope over experience.

Russell Brand remarked recently that since he had embraced monogamy on his marriage to Katy Perry, “I’ve become a bloody good gardener”. Do not be surprised if Brand appears on a gardening programme soon. Another handsome, married man to cause a flutter in the woodshed. Gardeners are notoriously promiscuous with their love. And their interests swing wildly, particularly at this time of year, when we can convince ourselves that this season all our plants will work. In the words of The Bolter, who was speaking in another connection: “One always thinks that, darling, every, every time.”

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