It’s a jungle out there…

Illustration by Clara Dupré

According to Big Gardening, horticulture is good for us. All that fresh (relatively) air, the nurturing and tending, the communing with what passes for nature. Look! There, amid the holly, it’s a robin! OK, no, it’s an empty vape. But still. Hang on, though. What if it’s simply brainwashing? Have all those kindly gardening celebrities been pumping out misinformation for decades, to con us? Wake up, sheeple. It’s time to examine the evidence for ourselves.

First, think of the tools. There are two kinds: sharp or pointy. At least in cookery, another dangerous pastime, wooden spoons are basic kit. But gardening requires blades, either honed to a Samurai edge or rusty, sap-sticky, too blunt to cut anything but human flesh.

Then there’s the pathogens. The place is heaving: Legionnaires’ disease in standing water; bioaerosol fungal particles steaming off compost heaps; Weil’s disease from the urine of those friendly allotment rats; tetanus bacteria excitedly jiggling their flagella as they await a puncture wound. Oh, and then there’s the rain, mud, fallen leaves, overgrown roots and dried-out topsoil. Every surface is a trip hazard. That’s before factoring in the stepladders, bamboo canes, chainsaws, broken terracotta, eye-level branches, moistened electricity, brambles, herbicides/fungicides/insecticides, irritant sap, delicious phytotoxins, bonfires, even rakes for cartoon-style black eyes.

It’s a miracle that any of us is upright, however graceful, competent and nimble. Then there’s me. There is, I believe, no vetting to become a gardener. I simply blundered into it, thanks to a) greed b) a fondness for mud. No one checked my balance or proprioception. They didn’t ask if I often fall over while brushing my teeth, or crash into the kitchen doorway en route to breakfast. Everyone ignored the compelling question of whether I can put my clothes on the right way up, or out; remember my keys, my ears; manage to open my own front door. So who gave me permission to garden?

It’s fine at the allotment. Actually it’s not. Although I’ve begged my neighbours never to lend me their power tools, if tragedy strikes, no one will call an ambulance. They’ll be too busy fighting over all that soil-nourishing blood and bone. But at least they’re nearby, in shouting distance. It’s when I’m left to my own devices that true peril awaits.

My problem is twofold: passion and idiocy. I am, after all, modestly famous in certain artistic circles for suffering a friction burn on my knee one Christmas Day after skidding across the floor singing the greatest song of all time, Total Eclipse of the Heart: true ardour knows no boundary. And once I’m outside, gardening, I become even less bodily cautious. Oh, blood’s dripping down my cheek from a thorn scratch? No time for Savlon; I’ll sluice myself with carbolic acid before bed. Bare feet + rain + a sack of compost + the metal staircase down to my half of the garden might, you say = disaster? OK, I did crack a few ribs, but weren’t weeks of agonising pain worth it, for the five seconds I saved not putting on shoes? And my remaining vertebrae, already compressed by years of novel-writing, need to stop making a fuss about being bent at a 110 degree (approx) angle for whole afternoons. Charles Dudley Warner, a mostlyforgotten American humorist, wrote “What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it” and for this, at least, he deserves immortality. And what about knees? If God had meant us to kneel, she would have given us quilted cartilage.

For my most recent gardening injury, I’ve only myself to blame. As any roof-terrace gardener knows, there is no plant pot so overgrown that one won’t try to ram in another seven baby corianders, five narcissi bulbs, three flimsy kales, two rescue succulents, one pilfered possible-Douglas fir treelet and a handful of date-pits (you never know) (yes you do).

I had a tray of seedlings. Every container I owned was utterly, terminally full. I’d checked every recycling bin, skip and passer-by in vain. Wait: there, under the repurposed saw-horse, what was that gleam? Could it be an empty panettone tin? What was I waiting for? I grabbed a broken-tipped screwdriver, grasped the tin, steadied it and then sta…

Oh. Who knew that resting the tin’s thin base on my T-shirted stomach might have consequences? Yes yes yes, a less spontaneous person might have turned it rim-side first, even placed it on the floor. I’ve just looked online: for the very sensible indeed, who possess drills, appropriate drill-bits include: high-speed steel (HSS), black oxide and cobalt. But who has time for that? Let’s not make a fuss. I didn’t self-eviscerate. There was almost no blood. And if I bear an unfaded scar on my torso, isn’t that par for the course? Who among us is not scarred by love?

It’s been suggested that I hang up my weapons, that bladeless, soilless, thornless gardening is all I’m fit for. But what does that leave? Hydroponics? Cress? But cress involves moistened kitchen towel, and only an idiot could think there’s no way to damage oneself with that. Hmm. Only an idiot.