‘Spring has sprung – and I’m in a plant panic’

As with my many other ruinous fixations – first editions of Edna O’Brien, chocolate-covered coffee beans – my obsession with gardening started modestly. Arrogantly, I’d thought I was immune: I wasn’t a retiree who believed advertorials, or outdoorsy, or descended from runner-bean enthusiasts with strong views about chutney. I was an indoor child, a city adult; reading was my only sport. I’d see adverts for garden centres and think: ha, suckers. You won’t catch me.

Then I moved to a modest upstairs flat and my downfall was ensured. I could have simply ignored its ugly roof terrace: windswept; tiled with, almost certainly, asbestos; overlooking a vista of security grilles. But I had a toddler, and children, apparently, need air. I bought a pot, compost and, for some reason, a clematis, combined them and hoped for the best.

Yes, I had books, and the embryonic internet, but why research something properly, when it was quicker, and less boring, to make it up as I went along? Sadly clematis, plural, require space, water, knowledge of pruning groups and potash. The clematis died.

I know, I thought. I’ll try strawberries.

And that was it. I fell. Perhaps the danger point was how saintly, how virtually Italian I felt when I presented my children with a single leaf of basil. Without experiencing the delicious armpitty scent of tomato leaves, or the adhesive tenderness of a baby bean, I might still have been saved. But the moment I realised that I, an amateur, when not writing bits of novel, could grow, say, Scottish blackcurrants, Italian bitter leaves, Japanese herbs usually only available individually cling-filmed from Asian supermarkets – anything I could conceivably ingest, the rarer the better – I was utterly and irrevocably hooked.

Addictions need supply. I’m not proud; I find my fix where I can: blighted high-street hardware shops, online rhubarb-crown exchange forums, spooky rural nurseries, the world’s least tempting supermarket foyer (Morrison’s, Nag’s Head Market, north London, on which Dante based his Second Circle of Hell, “a place where nothing shines”). I now have slightly more growing space: a few square meters down slippery metal stairs off an even smaller roof terrace than the one which got me into this mess, plus half an allotment 45 minutes’ muddy walk away, for which I waited 16 years. And, although I complain incessantly about my polluted soil, and not having a car to transport the delightful treasures I find on the street, I never really acknowledge the true cost of progress: I have more room. Which means: I need more plants.

The twice-annual local plant fair is a disaster, the highlight of my year. Not for me the grand flower shows – Chelsea, Hampton Court – which make my inner foreign peasant sweat. This one, in a primary school playground, opens at 9.30am. When I rock up, all the bargains have gone, swiped by the hardcore aficionados in their Carnivorous Plant Society moisture-wicking fleeces, casually ghosting close friends as they home in on every last Agave Vlad the Impaler and Brachyglottis Sunshine (“Who can resist a felted buff underleaf?”)

Who cares? I’m not here for lance-shaped bipinnate ferns; I barely understand the point of flowers, let alone shade-loving foliage. Surely I have the self-control to resist an epimedium? I’ll simply rush in, bag the Arctic raspberry I unarguably need from my favourite plant stall and then on to the allotment, a mere £10 down.

Poor deluded fool. Like Coleridge, thinking he should perhaps just sample that lump of opium, or Marguerite Duras necking her first glass of cognac, merely being in the presence of plants, in a competitive atmosphere, quickens my blood. Pineberries, Turkish toothwort cress... Plus, isn’t it time I considered peppercorn self-sufficiency, and surely organic miniature kiwis would actually save me money? Chinese quinine, you say, is virtually useless, but in the event of nuclear catastrophe, it could lie between us and death. And shouldn’t I open my mind to the possibilities of, say, Euonymus europaeus ‘Red Cascade’, the best form of native spindle

Two hours pass. Sick with buyer’s regret, I stagger home with donated Waitrose bags stuffed with plants I will probably kill through drought, absent-mindedness or, worst of all, by crowding them in with last year’s purchases, which I also immediately regretted. I need help. I also need, evidently, more containers.

Then I remember. There’s a pot stall at the autumn plant fair. If I can just hang on til then…

Charlotte Mendelson is a novelist. Her latest book, Wife, is now out in paperback. Her gardening column will appear here every fortnight

Photograph by Getty Images