. . . on green shoots
IN MY HEAD I quite fancy myself as someone who happily potters about, secateurs in one hand and funky watering can in the other. I was quietly devastated when my name wasn’t pulled out of the hat for a space in a community allotment a few months ago because, again in my head, where I can also ballroom dance and win Olympic badminton titles, I grow prize-winning potatoes and the kind of spring onions that taste of spring onions, as opposed to water.
For the record, I don’t believe it came down to the luck of the draw. It’s more likely they did covert examinations of the applicants’ existing back yards and turned me down for being a very chancy gardener.
For the first time in ages, I am out back examining the sorry remains of our post-winter notalot-ment. It would be contravening some class of horticultural trades description act to call it a garden. State of it. The measly-looking raised bed. The once-white walls decorated by cat paw scratchings and peeling paint. A clump of rosemary. Another of chives. Something that looks like weeds. Unruly tarragon. Moss. Abandoned picnic cutlery. The long-since accidentally crushed shells of snails.
Even notalot-ments take upkeep apparently. Family members did the initial planting last year. Back then the bounty included pansies, runner beans and a massive haul of St John’s Wort. I assumed they would be back occasionally to appraise the situation, making sure everything in the notalot-ment was rosy. They didn’t want to be gardening enablers, so they left me to my own, sadly lacking, devices.
It should have been very different. I interviewed Diarmuid Gavin once. Afterwards he listened politely when I told him about the “space” I was looking to turn into a “Zen escape”. Yes, I used those actual words. It was the kind of stuff a few of us were coming out with at the time as we turned our noses up at Dulux for the luxury of Farrow Ball. It’s all just paint. Even if it comes in various shades of Downton Abbey. Some of us forgot that for a while.
Clearly the children weren’t even a rumble in my tummy when I was discussing Zen gardens or I’d have realised the most Zen experience I’d be having for a long, long time was endless YouTube views of episode one (it’s always episode one) of the sublime In The Night Garden.
Obligingly, Gavin took out a piece of paper to sketch his far superior version of my vision. I don’t remember the details. All I know is that there was a soothing water feature and Buddhas. Loads of Buddhas. “Call me,” he said, but when I got home I realised that, even for me, expecting your man off the telly to design my garden was out-of-the-ball-park cheeky.
Somewhere in a parallel universe, this Gavin-designed patch of garden exists though. All rare lichen and copper sculptures. A feng shui fantasy that has no chance of being realised now. which is grand because I don’t want that any more.
Still, my lamentable notalot-ment, the state of it. By this time of year I thought there would be snowdrops and daffodils, crocuses and bluebells, that kind of thing. Turns out you have to plant bulbs for that to happen. In September, of all faraway months.
So my gardening dreams were all seeming a bit hopeless and my motivation depressingly fallow when I read the extract from our gardening correspondent Jane Powers's new book. She writes in The Living Garden: A Place That Works With Natureof "shy bulbs poking out of the soil like nose cones of miniature green rockets". Of how as the days lengthen, a "pale and waxy hatchling emerges, surging upwards through the soil and turning green when it nudges into the light". And that was it. Inspiration. Her words planted a seed, as it were.
On a more practical level, she is also responsible for directing me to quickcrop.ie, an excellent resource that informs me that now is the time to plant pak choi, broccoli, tomatoes and my soon to be legendary spring onions. I have actual packets of seeds ready. A new trowel. And a very ungrand but no less worthwhile design.
Outside the sun is shining on the notalot-ment and, as usual, it puts a different light on things. The decking is slick underfoot from early morning rain. In one corner, a sort of bonsai rhubarb plant sprouts forth and whispers of crumbles to come. It’s best not to think of the neighbourhood cats and what I’ve seen them doing in that bit of the raised bed over the past few months. Better to think of the harvest, those plump pink stalks, chopped, mingling with ginger, and bubbling in a pan.
I am gardening’s slowest learner. The ultimate late bloomer. But next spring, next spring, next spring.