Gardens
Powerplay
Ursula Buchan
Gardening can be tedious. However, gardeners display a reticence about this fact that amounts almost to a conspira- cy of silence. Many wish to convince the whole world that their hobby is fascinating in all its aspects, but that is not true. It is a liberating feeling to admit that, though one is passionately interested in the cultivation of plants, certain occupations such as weeding, spraying, and mixing compost are not endlessly absorbing.
Some gardeners will not acknowledge this even to themselves. Amongst these I would number the 'power players'.
The typical power player is a middle- aged man, perhaps the senior partner in a firm of solicitors, who lives in a pleasant village a few miles outside a provincial town. He has an acre of ground, including a small orchard and vegetable garden, as productive as his wife and the OAP who comes once a week can make it. A power player does not need to own a large estate; power-playing is a state of mind.
Gardening bores him, but he likes the idea of it, and finds talking at dinner parties about the water-absorbing prop- erties of polyacrylamides makes a welcome change from the miners' strike. He feels, too, the need to retain some link with the soil, so important, he maintains, to his forebears.
To give credence to his assertion that he is far too busy to weed, he has equipped himself with a leaf-blower, mini-tractor, electric hedge-trimmers, and, best of all in his view, a chainsaw. These tools foster in him a sense of importance such as I myself experienced when first let loose with a dumper-truck at Kew. Appreciation of, and pride in, the power and impact of machines overtakes him, and he forgets he is not as strong and fit as he was in those exhilarating days when he stroked Lady Margaret III. On Saturday mornings he
calls cheerily to his wife, 'I'm just going out to do a spot of gardening,' and leaves to sharpen the cutters on his chainsaw. HIS wife, though conscious of the attraction of gadgets and prey to a longing for all those useful little tools advertised in genteel mail order catalogues, which somehow never quite come up to expectation, sighs slight' ly, memorises the doctor's number, and reaches for the first-aid box. At best she has the prospect of plastering unpleasant little cuts in antiseptic cream, at worst an afternoon spent hanging around in Casual- ty. Not daring to watch, she hovers just out of sight. Her husband's chainsaw is an aggressive weapon, subject to spiralling costs like Trident but with no deterrent value. 'Why have it if you do not use it?' he argues. It cuts up, but more often cuts off and, worst of all, cuts down. Every apple tree with the merest hint of canker is severely dealt with, and ominous gaps begin to appear in ins orchard. The chainsaw's saving grace lies in the fact that it is difficult to maintain without proper tools and expertise and so is usuallY left to rust in a shed after the first occasion when its owner cuts through log, sawing horse, wellington boot and cavalry tvvills. Anxiety for the welfare of gardeners leads me to counsel caution with machin- ery. That and personal knowledge of the harm it can do in the garden. When I was 15, the sudden death of inY mother brought unwelcome burdens of responsibility onto the shoulders of lle,r children. Domestic help melted away an' we were faced with the problem of 'what to do about the garden'. Before that tune, gardening for us had consisted of mowing the grass under protest and absently pick- mg daisies out of the lawn while sunbathing and reading novels. As the summer wo1t! on towards autumn we watched, vat' dismay, the weeds grow alarmingly and threaten to engulf the rosebeds and her baceous borders. My elder brother with all the confidence and authority of his 18 years, took a hand. 'What we need', he declared, 'is the flame-thrower.' Up till then the flame gun had been used gingerly, just on the gravel paths and the damage had been limited to the scalloping of the adjacent lawn so that its edge, resembled a fancy curtain pelmet. hide in those days when weedkiller usual'Y meant sodium chlorate, a material not much less inflammable than paraffin, the, flame gun was quite as effective an' marginally less dangerous. How could the jet of fire, however: possibly differentiate between Golden Roo and sow thistle? All the vegetation burnt, flaring and dying much in the same way 3 firework splutters before finally going out' A wilderness was created in a few minutes and called, provisionally, peace. But worse, was to come. Very much in the swing or things now, we pointed the gun at a narroW, bed alongside of which grew a hedge °I Lonicera nitida, divided in the middle by a few steps; a hedge which served to temper the wind to the shorn novel-readers. A dreary green screen, it was nevertheless venerable and well-covered. The contents of the first border were annihilated satis- factorily, but when we turned the gun a little carelessly on the second half, the flame caught the hedge. There was a sound as of a hundred crisp packets being crum- Pled, and before anyone could say `Flam- menwerfer all that remained were the black, smoking skeletons of several thick trunks with their branches pointing sky- wards.
Although the fun to be had from garden Machinery is quite intoxicating, I freely admit, the power player would be well advised to hire rather than buy it. For if he retains a shred of self-control, and resists the temptation to use it excessively or for the wrong purposes, he will have to lock hIS beautiful equipment away in an out- building for months on end where it will sit depreciating rapidly. If he hires his chain- Saw, he knows that before the family can grow anxious about the glint of megaloma- nia in his eye he will be forced to give the damn thing back.
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