A stinging nettle in this gardening tale...
... which all started with an innocent enough al-fresco tinkle
I don’t know whether I should admit this, but since we’re all friends here why the heck not. When I was little, I didn’t think twice about having a wee in the great outdoors because it was the only time I felt graceful or gymnastic.
“Doing that made you feel like Olga Korbut?,” I hear somebody ask at the back. Yes, because whilst other parents were paying for their kids to have private tuition in maths, music or making stuff up, Mam Jones forked out for me to have lessons in how to do a forward roll as I was useless at PE.
Yet despite being a clumsy and accident-prone little girl with a Purdey bowl haircut and Kicker shoes, by some twist of fate, I had an innate ability to balance like a ballerina. This meant that squatting for a wee when on even the rockiest or inaccessible bits of ground when a loo was not around made me prance about like an Olympian.
I would even do a little salute post ‘business’, just like the pros do to signal the end of their routine. However, my proclivity came to a prickly end - something which also signalled the start of my interest in gardening.
There I was one playtime, doing what nature intended in a particularly secluded but overgrown patch on the green, green grass of home otherwise known as our garden up a mountain in south Wales. Only....ummm..... how can I delicately put this?
Unbeknownst to me, I had been sprinkling over some stinging nettles so, post-salute, I was surprised to find that some had become lodged on my, er, person. This was something which I only discovered as soon as I started to walk away thanks to the physics of friction and, OK, my inability to listen to my folks who’d warned me I’d come a cropper one day for not being interested in finding out the difference between weeds, plants, lavender and lavatories.
Suffice to say, I never did it again! Now I’m no expert gardener and I’ve still got to look up the difference between a perennial and an annual. If something requires a cold frame, cloche or grafting I’m simply not interested.
Yet the joy of watching Edelweiss and its pals bloom and grow, often literally overnight, is fascinating to me. Gardening, for me at least, is about getting dirty. And yes, that is me in the photo above after shifting two tonnes of topsoil one Saturday morning in the rain. Honestly, I’ve never been happier. Or dirtier!
Gardening is an obsession with pruning. Do I do it in spring? After flowering? Does it apply to everything? I mean, who can keep that information in their noodle? Gardening is the delight in the fact that ‘those long green things at the front that turn orange at the back’ came from my grandparents’ place.
Gardening is the packet of daisy seeds I received from the vets to remember my 23-year-old cat Reggie who I had to say goodbye to the other week. Gardening is about buying waterproof scatter cushions and having a daily debate with myself about egg chairs: Totally lovely or utterly ugly?
In short, gardening doesn't have to be about knowing your myosotis scorpioides from your Nigella damascena, it’s about trial and error
Whatever your idea of gardening is, there’s a lovely community dedicated to all things green-fingered on InYourArea.co.uk called InYourGarden. From growing irises to battling moss, they have experts to help with that.
And, yep you guessed it, I’m definitely not one of them.