Why I’m Not a Gardener

Our back garden is a challenge. It slopes sharply upward from the back door, like it’s trying to escape. I refer to the lawn as Mount Mowmore.

Anyway, we (read: I) decided to put in a couple of raised flower beds. Wooden frames. Nice and easy to tend. Mary was sceptical, but politely so — the way one might speak to a man who’s about to reinvent electricity with a fork.

I assembled my toolkit:

• A wheelbarrow
• A sieve
• Two spades (for optimism)
• A rake

It all looked very promising.

I started on the left-hand side. Digging. It was sunny. I was sweating like a condemned roof tile. Thirty minutes in, I had neat rolls of turf I didn’t know what to do with. They sat there like green carpet samples, accusingly. So I did the obvious thing: dumped them in a corner. Next to the bins. Where they could judge me at will.

Several hours, three cups of tea, and a bucketful of regret later, I had bare earth. And nothing else.

Mary came out. Assessed the scene.

“Still certain you can do this?”

“Oh yeah. I’ll dig two rectangles. Build the frames.”

(My spade may have chuckled. I ignored it.)

I dug. Barrowed soil. Sieved it.

Felt extremely expert.

Then realised I had no place to put the soil. So I tipped it in another corner.

The spade cleared its throat.

“Wouldn’t put it there, mate. It’ll be a pain in the arse to shift later.”

“Where then?”

“Rubble bags.”

Bollocks.

Off I went to a garden centre. Came back with rubble bags. Started filling them.

“Blimey, they are going to be bloody heavy,” said the spade.

“Oh, NOW you tell me.”

I’m pretty sure it shrugged.

I now had pits that were approximately rectangular. I placed my wooden posts. Started digging holes. Except the ground was… archaeologically challenging. Especially for a non-gardener.

“Er, cement, mate?” said the spade.

“Shit,” I replied.

I tried anyway. My second spade — the one with teeth — joined in. Grudgingly.

I attached the timber to the posts. Nothing lined up. The posts wobbled like pensioners on a trampoline.

The soil, the turf, the bags, the pits — it was all chaos. A war zone with dandelions.

Reader, I suspect you know a thing or two about gardening.

I don’t. Don’t mock me.

I gave up.

Showered. Collapsed in a heap.

Not dissimilar to the ones I’d left in the garden.

We got someone in. A proper gardener. He muttered something about ‘bloody amateurs’ and got to work. Watching him, I realised gardening isn’t about having the right tools. It’s about not being me.