At first, it was one of Herself’s notions; one of those I-must-do-that-someday ideas: fill the house with plants. Make the garden beautiful. Put in raised beds. I would nod supportively, partially because I wasn’t sure what a raised bed was.
Not that the garden is ugly. The original owners of our house seem to have been skilled gardeners. Different plants burst into colour at different times of the year, while out the front there’s a bottlebrush tree that blooms pink and then mauve. We routinely see passersby taking pictures of it. Occasionally they knock on our door to ask what it is. We have toyed with the notion of erecting a sign.
I am indifferent to gardening. I’ll do the jobs I’m told to do, but to me it feels like outdoor housework. And I assumed that Herself was the same, except something was itching at her: a sense she should have an interest in plants; almost like she owed it to the house. Yet at the same time, part of her regarded gardening as an Old Lady activity: the sort of thing people end up doing because they can’t think of any other way of filling their time.
Perhaps this ambivalence was sensed by the houseplants she first attempted to nurture. A lot of them died. But, like a B-movie evil scientist, she continued her crazed experiments. Some remained green, some quickly turned brown, and she would regularly bemoan her inability to keep things alive: as if this was a moral failing on her part. As if the plants knew her heart wasn’t really in it.
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Or so I assumed. Because as she continued and even extended her efforts, I didn’t notice the slow change that was taking place within her. It still seemed like a chore she felt she had to perform, until the day she announced to me that she would like a raised bed.
When I say “announced”, I really mean “instructed”. Construction projects are my department, so after a bit of googling and measuring and conversations with Herself that involved a lot of sighing and head-shaking on my part, I built one. It was fun to make, but surprisingly expensive: especially the soil-filling part. Nature costs a lot of money.
The plants that she eventually installed there cost even more. I only know this because when I asked, she deflected the question and once again presented her gardening habit as just another aspect of domestic maintenance. But I was starting to suspect otherwise. The plants in the raised bed were not only lovely, but very much alive – and I noticed now that this success had been replicated elsewhere, in dozens of pots inside and outside our home.
I noticed too how much time she was spending watering or pruning, and at odd hours. She’d get out of bed and the first thing she would do was reach for the secateurs. I was starting to feel like a gardening widower, while she suddenly seemed like a gambler who has had some luck with the horses, and can’t help but continue to chase that dopamine hit.
I may have been in denial. But I didn’t fully realise the depth of her compulsion until we took a trip to that most benign-sounding venue: the garden centre. Ostensibly, it was to buy a bench. But it quickly became apparent that she had little interest in that. I did the bench-buying, while she danced among various shrubs, almost squealing with delight as she filled her trolley. Once again, she wouldn’t tell me how much she paid, and it was only when we got home that she admitted that she doesn’t know where these new shrubs will go. She doesn’t have the room for them.
They crowd around our back door, as if seeking Herself’s nurturing hands. And they look at me and seem to be thinking: we don’t need him.
