Planting 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.

In this matter the Irish middle class exhibits a striking uniformity of belief. In a recent survey, nine out of 10 of them stated that they would prefer their children to marry gardeners. Not so much slaves to Rome these days then as slaves to loam. But what happens if you have lost your faith in gardening? How do you deal with the emotional and intellectual isolation that comes with the knowledge that you will never be bringing your own home-grown salad leaves to work?

How do you carry on when you know that, contrary to all the lies peddled in the newspapers, on the radio and on television, that you can go wrong with potatoes?

It is hard to try again once you have been visited by carrot fly. It is shaming to realise that your salad leaves (yes, salad leaves are a pretty constant motif) are not so much “cut and come again”, as simply “cut”. That all those optimistic wigwams which were to punctuate your herbaceous border with lovely tents of prettily flowered runner beans are still naked in August, and visited only as a last resort by the dog, who prowls your denuded garden in vain in her search for privacy.

You mark my words, blue-sky gardening will become the curse of this country. We are being peddled the illusion that seeds always germinate, that cabbage never gets eaten by anything but humans, that tomatoes ripen on the vine. Whereas the truth is that at the end of this summer it is quite possible that our blasted plots will have nothing left standing but the perpetual spinach.

You know, blue-sky thinking has got us into a bit of trouble before. But, understandably in many ways, no one has the heart to tell the truth about gardening. The scandal of compost alone is horribly under-reported; compost is one of the great social myths of our time. Your average urban garden will never produce enough compost to fertilise itself. You will be left with a bin full of either green slime or brown tinder. The only thing that will thrive in your compost bin will be an active colony of fruit flies, which will follow you into the house if you lift the lid to put as much as a potato peel on the pile.

If, on the other hand, you decide to construct two large open boxes in which compost will rot to alternate deadlines, this arrangement – ugly and taking up a lot of space – will provide you with a clear view of the rats which frequent it. Thank God I never got a wormery.

All of this reminds us urban dwellers of a point that we love to forget – that nature is often disgusting. No wonder our grandfathers came to the city and covered their new gardens with lots of lovely, empty lawn. Those that grew vegetables kept them a respectable distance from the house, down the end of the garden, shielded by line of currant bushes, as if they were some sort of old-fashioned privy.

No wonder either that during the boom we covered the little bit of earth we owned – or, more properly, the bank owned – with decking, paving and gravel. Then we threw in a barbecue and a couple of garden chairs. You know what, we were dead right. At least the gardens got used during the boom, even as the torrential rain of those summers beat off the canvas roof of the gazebo.

So as a nation we have come rather late to gardening and even later to vegetable growing. Within living memory the country people who grew cabbages and gooseberries in full public view at the front of their houses were rather patronised and certainly not emulated. Now they would be very much in vogue, and their advice would be sought after, if only they were still alive.

But they’re not alive, unfortunately, and we must deal with what we have. Those of us who no longer believe in blue-sky gardening are left not only with the perpetual spinach (indestructible and the only plant that can be recommended with any honesty at all) but with the perpetual problem of the agnostic: what do we believe in? It has become somehow socially irresponsible not to garden.

So those of us who no longer believe in gardening must go through the motions of pretending that we do, like Trevor Howard, the atheist prior of the monastery in Brian Moore's Catholics. We know that blue-sky gardening is a big lie and that the vegetables will never make it to the table, but we keep on trying, sowing rocket as we go. But we're telling you, it's going to end in tears.