Gardens
Round the mulberry bush
Ursula Buchan
Children and gardening go together like peppermint chocolate and red wine: badly. This is odd because children are natural gardeners; why else should they love sand-pits so? However, even more than with other arbitrary and inexplicable adult pursuits, small children get painfully in the way of the business of gardening, proving a danger to themselves, and an unwelcome distraction to their bad- tempered progenitors. It is not, of course, the child's fault that he has yet to learn the ground rules upon which this agonisingly time-consuming i activity is based: that most of the time is spent on one's knees pulling out annual nettles (without being stung, by some magic) and jolly buttercups, while leaving alone a mass of drab, stripy leaves; and that, for some reason, only grown-ups are allowed to pick flowers from the borders. The more committed and sophisticated the gardener, the rougher the time had by the child. The blue plastic slide is tidied away without explanation, ball-games are kept to a grudging minimum, portions of useful lawn are hijacked and planted up, and flower beds are out of bounds (except to grown-ups who walk on them all the time). I feel particularly sorry for my own children: instead of idly pulling out the odd sow-thistle while playing Grandmother's Footsteps, I stride out into the garden, armed with notebooks, with a brow not so much furrowed as double-dug by the ne- cessity to do a 'proper job'. In those circumstances, the playful removal or transposition of labels is liable to prompt, in the eyes of the child, a quite disprop- ortionately loud explosion. It was after a particularly heartfelt out- burst that I determined that the gap between what I wished to do and what interested and absorbed the children would h. ave to close. I set aside a piece of ground in the vegetable garden, where my pre- cious colour schemes are unimportant, but which is good, well-dug soil (not like the shaded, stony, ill-favoured corner which I was given as a child). In it my daughter (aged five) grows fast-growing vegetables like pumpkins and potatoes. The former, provide they germinate, can do with any amount of watering, which is just as well, for watered they will be — about ten times a day. With luck the fruits of labour will do for Hallowe'en. Potatoes are satisfactory because their progress can be monitored by removing just a little soil to expose the tubers. I bow to tradition and provide seed for her to grow lettuces and radishes (the vegetables most often recommended for children's gardens) but not with much conviction, for children are rarely enthu- siastic about growing food they do not eat. Bush cherry tomatoes (sown in pots on the window-sill), which need not have their side-shoots removed, are pretty and useful. Best of all are pot marigolds (Calendula officinalis) and nasturtiums (Tropaeolum malus), so resolutely excluded from the garden proper, which germinate like cress, flower without cease, and satisfy the need children have for really bright colours. Nasturtiums are also edible. Sowing and thinning are, of course, haphazard affairs but it hardly matters. Much more important, to me at least, is that my children can now recognise com- mon weeds. From the grown-up gardener's point of view, accurate weed identification is vital; once learned, the young can be set to a spot of child labour in the big borders. As all they want to do is to feel helpful (for a few minutes, at least) this is hardly too unkind. I allow the use of the best hand- tools, although the long-handled Dutch hoe is now banned after an incident con- cerning the greenhouse glass. it Most people with small children will find no hardship to prune the old common shrubs, which form the backbone of many gardens, so that safe little hiding places can be made, nor to scythe the nettles round the bonfire to avoid agonised screams in summer. It is no sacrifice either to plant, in a shady place, the Mouse Plant (Arisarum proboscideum) with its glossy green leaves under which scuttle the long brown 'tails' and humped 'backs' of the curious flowers, the Curry Plant (Helichrysum angustifo- lium) for the smell of the crushed leaves, the non-flowering form of Lamb's Ears (Stachys Lanata 'Silver Carpet') for the furry feel of the leaves, and ornamental grasses, whose seed-heads attract the birds. It is scarcely a deprivation to ban the Common Laburnum with its baleful seeds, or the sinister Monkshood, if one cannot depend on one's children not to eat things. There is no reason to be obsessed about all poisonous plants, however, once your child- ren have reached the age of reason; I grew up in a garden full of Cuckoo Pint but I cannot remember ever having any desire to eat the orange and red berries.
Interesting children in grown-up con- cerns like food-gathering and encouraging wildlife should appeal to the incipient adult in them; growing plants for fun appeals to the child in me. If, however, as may well be, my children's interest in their garden- ing does not last long, I shall buy a few succulent plants, like 'living stones' (Lithops) and the spineless sea-urchin cac- tus (Astrophytum asterias), for them to grow in the house; these should take even longer to die of thirst and neglect than the hamster.
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