Gardening David Wheeler
NOT ALWAYS A BED OF ROSES
Forty years ago, on a blowy March morning, I stood overlooking a new prospect: a third of an acre of south-facing greensward, overlaying free-draining, thin, sandy, Surrey loam, spotted with a trio of mistletoe-laden apple trees.
It was my first proper garden – and one to do with as I wished. My job had recently been made redundant (jobs are made redundant, not people) and the thought of spending an unknown number of weeks or months planning and crafting a new garden outweighed any immediate financial worries.
No collar; no tie; no commuting. I was in my mid-thirties – fit, strong, energetic and, above all, fanatical about my new-found possession and the opportunities it offered.
I was not a complete novice. My father died when I was a teenager, and a childhood interest in plants and gardens blossomed as I took control of our suburban plot on the Hampshire coast. While my mates were buying lads’ mags, I was forking out for the likes of Amateur Gardening and Popular Gardening, concealing them the best I could – boys in the late Fifties and swinging Sixties didn’t buy gardening magazines.
Activity accelerated as that 1979 spring advanced. Days grew longer and milder, beds and borders emerged from feeble turf, and new plants were lovingly placed and nurtured. A glance back on those horti-pioneering days cheers me no end – so, too, the surviving plants donated by friends now gardening aloft.
I’m on my third and probably last garden (see my February column) but have spent several weeks unwillingly away from it. Like an addict denied his fix, I’ve been languishing on a hospital ward – with a complicated spinal problem, something dreaded by all active gardeners – hopelessly deprived of bucolic smells, muddy feet, grubby hands and dirty fingernails. I’m glad, though, of news on how the tulips are doing at home, how well the witch-hazels flowered, and what augurs well for the sweet-smelling viburnums and rhododendrons – which, a mere but unreachable 30 miles away, I know to be perfuming our few riverside acres.
Oldies everywhere experience similar anxieties. Gardening is as physical as it is aesthetic, muscular travails being equally important to both our corporal and mental wellbeing. Remember that sheer exhaustion felt after a day’s digging and planting? And then the evening tub, the Radox, the Epsom salts, that comforting unit from the optic, the early night...
Gardening can defy old age and disability. It’s a question of pacing yourself. It shouldn’t be competitive. Lying in my hospital bed, I’m dreaming up a couple of new planting schemes.
The rose-grower David Austin’s demise at 92 shortly before Christmas reminded me how much I have enjoyed and, indeed, relied upon his English Roses. Among his earliest successes was ‘Constance Spry’, a glorious, myrrhscented confection which can be grown as both a large shrub or climber.
To mark Mr A’s passing, I’ll pin one to a fallen tree in a sunny patch in the woodland garden. Its tendrils will trace the dead tree’s limb structure, allowing me in-between to plant bulbs and ground-covering perennials to harmonise with Spry’s clear pink complexion.
Roses grow well for us on the Herefordshire/powys border. Clay over gravel is just the ticket, and our rainfall almost guarantees success. In my far-off sandy Surrey days, roses failed miserably; they like to get their roots into something firm.
This new ‘pink picture’ goes some way to compensate for my hospital ward’s lack of a window... I only have to close my eyes.