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My Garden's a Jungle...
Michele Hanson has always imagined that a garden would be a haven of peace and tranquility. Reality has proved rather different...
During my 20 years pent up in flats I used to long for somewhere to sit in the sun, grow divine fruit and vegetables, to have a pond full of froggies and, best of all, I could at last have a dog - this was my dream.
But the garden has been a battle field. In it and over it, I have fought family, friends, neighbours, the elements, the gardener, the council and swarms of pests. My garden is an emotional minefield. In the beginning I shared it with a friend. I had planned a sort of kitchen garden, runner beans and blackberries clambering up the fences, courgettes ripening on the sunny side, tomatoes on the patios. But she preferred flowers - she was desperate for alpines and rockeries. But where would I put my vegetables?
Out we went into the garden together planting our own separate favourite things in a rather tense way. It was our theatre of war. We could share the house, just about, but we couldn't share the garden. Although it flourished for the first summer stuffed with heavenly wallflowers, 58 lbs of tomatoes, clouds of lobelia, fencefuls of runner beans, it smelt divine, it looked like paradise, but in the end we fell out over other things and the garden was neglected.
My friend moved out, children, guinea pigs and a puppy took her place, and nibbled and trampled the garden and turned it into a desert. And then my mother moved in. She adored forsythia but gardener pruned it down to stumps. My mother was heartbroken. For two years it failed to bloom. Naturally my mother grew to hate gardener, a rather good friend of mine. He had ruined two springs for her and she wasn't expecting to live to see another one. In a revenge attack, she pruned gardener's favourite roses rather viciously and trampled on his newly dug earth. It threw gardener into a sullen fury. Two new enemies battled over the garden.
Eventually a third spring arrived. The forsythia bloomed and my mother was still here. The mood in our garden mellowed. Things calmed down until one day our neighbour built a huge shed at the end of the garden. Naturally we had a shout. Now we stride past each other in the street silent and glaring when once upon a time we used to pass the time of day.
Meanwhile, my mother has found another hate-figure, it's our neighbour on the other side. He's allowed convululous to rampage over the fence and suffocate our roses. It's a jungle out in our garden.
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