For those of you on a spiritual quest, who live every moment, in the moment and who stumbled onto this blog attracted by the title; to you, I say, “I’m Sorry.” Sadly, this blog has nothing to do with enlightenment. It is about gardening, and a very specific subgenre of gardening at that, triage.
You are all well aware of natural, organic gardening, which makes much use of horse manure to mulch roses, and urine for the wholesale slaughter of greenfly, or some such. Maybe you have also noticed ultra-low maintenance gardening, the mainly urban-focused art of plastic lawns, sinister (or hilarious, depending on your point of view,) singing, garden gnomes along with infestations of potted plants. These bloom year-round because they too are made from oil-based polymers. However, most green-fingered practitioners, hang out somewhere between both camps. They can be found out front, or back, on bended knees, every weekend; these frontline soldiers of the never-ending war on weeds.
Triage gardening, for those who have never heard of it, is not half as glamourous as it sounds. Though the ER of this art form, there are no George Clooneys looking cool in swabs, having their foreheads wiped free from sweat in a glasshouse as they graft an underdeveloped windfall apple back onto its stem. This is a panic-based gardening, the only form I practice.
Yes, I am aware that there are gardeners out there who would be offended by my ignorance but, when it comes to all things horticultural, ignorance, sadly, defines me. There is no excuse for this. It is not as though I suffered from garden deprivation as a child, or lacked a knowledgeable, green-fingered mentor, a gardener who shared the secrets of aphid elimination with the seven-year-old barnacle who accompanied him as he worked. He also warned of the dire consequence of the, much-feared, carrot fly. But, as with the valuable advice concerning black spot, this information has long ago slipped from my memory banks.
My mother is the only one of my family who has ever shown any real interest in the floral world and was responsible for the many scattered gardening encyclopaedias which littered my childhood sitting room. Even today, in her nineties, she can regularly be seen smoking cigars as she sprays weeds which dare to pop up in her lawn. For these reasons, I always assumed that she understood what she was doing. The covid lockdown led me to reconsider.
The first dawning that she might not be made of the right gardening stuff occurred to me when my mother recently visited Germany, leaving instructions with me to water her outdoor, potted plants.
Promises were made, mothers dispatched, and potted plants immediately forgotten. The result was that after a couple of weeks, I spotted a wilt and, looking closer it seemed to me that the curtain was about to drop on the last act of some tragic, gardening opera.
Triage gardening now came in to its own. The potted plants were ambulanced to a sort of gardening emergency room, the back yard, if I’m honest. With the plants in the recovery position, up to their waists in water, I looked around the back yeard and was struck by a stray thought. Thoughts like these should never be entertained as they can lead to thinking if left unchecked. And that is exactly what happened.
Something bothered me about the large evergreen in the middle of the lawn. Wasn’t it supposed to be a miniature tree, merely decorative? It would be impossible to call this specimen miniature, unless the house suddenly hailed from Lilliput, because there was no denying it, the tree now stood a head and shoulder above the chimney stack.
Brushing aside cobwebs in the mind, I recalled my mother pacing the garden with a designer some twenty years ago. There was talk of a proposed flagstone path leading to a small sitting area a little way past the miniture tree. In theory, this was a lovely plan and for the first few years it seemed to be working beautifully.
However, my mother’s bonsai turned out to be more like Jack’s beanstalk reaching for the heavens, than an ornamental, decorative addition to the back garden. And one consequence of this tree-surprise was that the flagstone path became blocked, redundant, led nowhere. Standing beside the slowly rehydrating plants, I realised there was something missing from the picture. The path had completely disappeared, had been reclaimed by the lawn. It was seriously, jaw-droppingly absent.
Here, like a politician fessing up to a minor indiscretion from the past, I must admit that once a year I pick up a spade and use it. However, before you begin to think that I may have the seeds of a gardener, long dormant in me, ready to germinate at any second, I must quash your hopes. My annual spadework has more to do with drains than lawns, more to do with a creaking, old house, than with me becoming reacquainted with the soil.
My mother’s drains have a nasty habit of launching a surprise attack if not carefully maintained. Way back in my teens, during an ancient, drain incident, I had to unearth the architect’s drawings of the house in order to discover where the long-overgrown manhole covers might be found. Locating those which had not been tarmacadamed over (under layers of topsoil) taught me the importance of accurate drawings and manhole cover maintenance.
So, once a year, neighbours are treated to an unusual sight, me with a spade in my hand.
This year, standing in the back yard, administering care to thirsty greenery, and admiring a well-trimmed manhole cover, it occurred to me how gardening brownie points could possibly be scored with my mother. It might even compensate a little for the near dead foliage left in my care.
If the flagstone path could be found, the reasoning went, somehow unearthed, my mother might be impressed. Maybe I mused, an archaeological radar system could be sourced to help with the work. Afterall, if the police use sonic scanning equipment to unearth human remains, perhaps I could uncover the greatest gardening crime of all, neglect. But for me, there were no high-tech solutions. This mystery was to be solved the old-fashioned way, with a spade.
Perhaps, I thought, looking at the lawn, there was a path fairy I had never heard of, a fairy who steals decorative paths which lead nowhere, not even to the back of the garden. Considering the creatures who abound in Irish folklore, there could very well be. Afterall, we have the Red Man who kidnaps drunks and spends the night beating them up. Then there is the Cellar Fairy, who drinks the cellar dry when the homeowner is not paying attention (maybe the phenomenon of teenage drinking did not exist when fairies were invented.) There are also those sinister figures, who steal babies because they cannot have children of their own. But a path fairy, that might be pushing the plausibility boundaries too far, even by Irish standards.
It was a pensive writer who tested the soil around him. To those of you who have never lost a manhole cover, or a footpath, to your lawn, the recovery process, or divination system is simple. Test the ground, if the spade goes down easily, move on. When the ground fights back, you have reason to hope. But even then you must work your way around the edge of the suspected flagstone before peeling away the soil to reveal the concrete underneath. Once a stone is revealed, move on to the next search site. Slowly my mother’s path began to reveal itself as it crept its way from back of the house to the non-bonsai tree, where it disappeared completely. Digging would have had to become mining, or forestry, if the rest of the path were to be uncovered.
So, I stopped at the tree, examined the neat piles of earth beside each of the twelve flagstones and wondered where my path led to exactly. The from was obvious, the where-to, less so. Ignoring the subterranean section, the tree itself had become its destination. Seen from the house, the eyes followed the serpentine path to the tree. They then clambered over its wide base, scampered past the tree’s narrow waist, and jumped past the pointed tip towards the heavens.
Pity I sent spiritual seekers packing earlier, they might have found some solace in a path that goes nowhere and yet, somehow leaves you contemplating the sky. Maybe, there was a path fairy guiding my every step after all, for who-knows-what reason.
However, as far as I’m concerned, my efforts were wasted. The twelve flagstones I unearthed failed to impress my mother. She decided, without investigating the miracle of the restored footpath, that the work could only have been done by someone with a strimmer! So, the credit went elsewhere. There was no point in me protesting. She knows my gardening prowess well enough to believe it couldn’t have been me who powered up a strimmer, because I do not possess one. As for the triage gardening, the patients survived, but that was not enough for my mother, who decided that more, is always more and pressganged my brother-in-law into action. He spent an afternoon, cramming a dozen more pot plants alongside slightly drought-damaged companions.
Still, sometimes I look out the kitchen window at my path and wonder where on earth it is leading me.
The podcast for this blog will follow shortly, after my voice has recovered from a covid assault that leaves hoarse and crocky.