Gardens
Health warning
Ursula Buchan
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the garden after the winter, I am here to tell you that it is not. In fact, you would be better off doing your weeding on a bypass roundabout than in the cosy, familiar privacy of your back garden. The garden, where you can give expression to your creative instincts or settle your jan- gling nerves with honest toil, is a complex of traps and pitfalls, of which a jungle might be proud. According to the Con- sumer Affairs Directorate of the DTI, 20 per cent of non-fatal accidents in the home relate to gardening. In 1996, the last year for which the directorate can give me fig- ures, there were 464,000 injuries.
At times we contribute all too blithely to these statistics. We wear treadless rubber boots, run down frosty steps, prune whippy climbing roses without eye protection, stretch too far on ladders, leave garden tools lying about in long grass, forget to plug in the RCD when switching on the electric hover mower, and would not dream of doing warming-up exercises before beginning on the winter digging. No won- der the accidents pile up.
The situation is even worse than that, however. Accidents can happen anywhere but there are gardening activities which are inherently deleterious to health. For exam- ple, Professor Mike Griffin of the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research was reported recently in Gardening Which? as saying that anyone who uses power tools, such as mowers and chainsaws, regularly or over long periods, risks Hand-Arm Vibra- tion Syndrome, the symptoms of which include tingling, numbness, cold and white fingers.
Now we gardeners know a thing or two about syndromes. One to which we are par- ticularly prone is Finger Cutting Syndrome, a common occurrence if care is not taken with a new pair of secateurs, whilst Eye Poking Syndrome affects all who don't watch where they are going when pushing through the shrubbery, or weeding between staked plants. My particular bugbear is Expletive Explosion Syndrome, which struck me particularly badly the day I put a garden fork through my foot.
Power-tools are pretty bad for syn- dromes, I can tell you. Although they have been improved in recent years by the adop- tion of safety features, such as plastic blades on small rotary mowers, automatic cut-outs, and anti-vibration systems on some chainsaws, nevertheless we can risk not only Hand-Arm Vibration Syndrome, but also what Professor Griffin might per- haps call Ear Loud-Noise Syndrome, the symptoms of which are tinnitus and hearing loss. Petrol-driven garden machinery can be extremely noisy, although, to be fair to manufacturers, there have been attempts to improve matters on this front too. Never- theless, particularly with large and old machines, there is still a problem. The gen- eration presently most furiously engaged in gardening is the one which assaulted their ears at Pink Floyd concerts in the Sixties. If their hearing was not damaged then, it will probably not have survived intact decades of once-weekly mowing expeditions, and three-monthly shredder or strimmer orgies.
I mention this one in particular because, unlike many gardening accidents which, though they may be foreseen, are not always easily prevented, hearing damage is perfectly avoidable. All you need is a pair of ear-muffs, of the type which are sold to game- and clay-pigeon shots. These muffs cover the entire ear and, though strikingly unglamorous, make mowing in the privacy of your own garden a great deal more pleasant.
If all this sounds drear and earnest, I have to say that there is a tangential advan- tage to these muffs, which I commend to all those people with reluctant gardening spouses. It is possible to wear, underneath them, the earpieces for a portable radio or disc player. My husband, for example, favours a small, long-wave radio, with a clip to attach it to pocket or belt, which you can buy for a tenner at cricket grounds, for lis- tening to Test Match Special. Indeed, the fact that the cricket season more or less Coincides with the grass growing is a great boon to me. Cricket being the stately, paced game it is, there is no problem in getting him in for lunch — which is lucky, for he could certainly not hear my shouts. The only problem is that, according to DTI statistics, he is even more likely to suffer some kind of harm once he gets back inside the house. Help!
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