Reaping
Jeffrey Bernard
It seems unlikely that I shall be writing this column this time next year. In fact, from henceforth, I don't intend ever to work again during the week of the Chelsea Mower Show and, as a future exhibitor, I don't really see how I can be expected to. When I first took up gardening — that was Precisely ten days ago — there were those Who put it down to a mere flash in the pan of Withdrawal, a temporary flight into the world of sanity prompted by a Tory election victory and a sharp slap across the wrists from the staff of the Middlesex Hospital; but I really feel that my horticultural capability is here to stay. I used to think that the only perso.n who couldn't possibly commit suicide was the man holding an ante-post voucher on the Derby, but now I realise that the man who has sown his seed and scattered, in the garden of course, is another case of chronic hope and optimism. To paraphrase Gibbon, It was on the 12th of May 1979, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of my new estate, While the gumbooted locals were singing Pop in the Queen's Arms, that the idea of planting some lettuces and sundry flowers first started to my mind.
Already, I am beginning to reap the rewards. A new life force surrounds my house, I now revel in rain as well as sunshine and when in the evening I lovingly water my peeping seedlings I find myself bitterly regretting the gallons of water! once wasted diluting whisky. Yes, every silver lining has a cloud and thank God for it.
As I say, it started only ten days ago. I knelt trowelless in a border, struck my index finger into mother earth, put a sunflower seed into the indentation, covered it, watered it and then went indoors exhausted. That very night I felt a hum, a buzz of expectation and the throbbing of new life welling up through the very foundations of the house. The next day, the two white ponies in my paddock — it's a poor man's Camargue here — suddenly whinnied and cocked their heads as though at an inexplicable terror. One glance at a corner in the garden where my deceptive-looking honeysuckle is squeezing the blood out of the granite cornerstone told me that the cornflowers and lupins were thrusting towards the light. It's like living bang on top of the San Fernando Fault here and if any rambling, hiking idiot of an admiral accidentally dropped an acorn hereabouts, I think I would have to move.
On the vegetable front I can't quite feel the same sense of awed enchantment. My runner bean seeds are now germinating with a rumble reminiscent of distant guns, but I have decided to distribute the fullgrown articles to the local poor and needy if I can find them.
And what to do with the coming and inevitable glut of tomatoes, all of them as scarlet and solid as snooker balls? At the moment the young and tender plants are wallowing in a manure that usually graces only the soil at Ascot, Epsom and Longchamp. Donated and passed by none other than Hawaiian Sound, this is the stuff that champions are made of. (As a sideline I am seriously thinking of going into the fertiliser business and anyone who wishes may send me a stamped addressed sack and choose from the horse, Cracaval, Two Of Diamonds or Tap On Wood).
The only sour note that has so far. crept into this gardening business is the one of snobbery and patronising contempt that I can hear in the voices of distant village neighbours, who think that gardens should consist of what I call flower shop flowers. Old houses need old-fashioned flowers but amazingly one local trainer's dogsbody tells me that hollyhocks are common. But then her garden only needs a coating of cellophane and it would look like Moyses Stevens. What I have to say to her and her ilk cannot, unfortunately, be said with flow.ers. Potatoes possibly. Old ones. But time will tell and come June the pulse of my chives and the laughter of my salad bed will be heard for miles as this hill cracks open.
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