This article by Tom Sharpe appeared in The Times on 1 May 1999.
Tom Sharpe came late to the pleasures of gardening. But, like his autobiographical character Blott, he has proved that anyone can grow plants and enjoy them.
I SUPPOSE I must come from a long line of coarse gardeners, certainly on my father’s side. My grandfather ended his life as a jobbing gardener in New Zealand, my father took it up obsessively when he retired to Sussex during the war. My brothers followed suit, and in the end, so did I.
I mention this only to prove that any fool can garden. Or as the commissioning editor at The Times put it, “Anyone Can Garden”. The main thing is to have the space, the soil, the seeds and the time. In my case there is also a curious love of digging, but then I am as obsessive about the soil and double-digging and dunging and making compost as my father was. And no plant likes double-digging with plenty of well-rotted dung and bone meal more than the rose.
My wife, who reads books about gardening and has a sinister relationship with shade plants that slugs adore, was responsible for my infatuation with planting things. She gave me The Dictionary of Roses and a single rose. I can’t remember what awful sort it was—it wasn’t showing its true colours at the time, and came from a discreet garden centre that had the decency to call itself a nursery.
I got out my rusty spade and set to work. I spent evenings reading about its needs, bone meal, potash to harden it for the winter, phosphates for root development and the need to dig two spits down and add plenty of dung. I planted that rose and was hooked.
Worse still, I was hooked on roses. Having pointed me in the right direction, my wife sat back and watched as I went to work. Or play. After two years I had packed the borders of that small back garden with more than 100 hybrid teas, floribundas and climbers. There were roses in clay pots, rambling roses by the garage and the neighbours (more sensitive to the clash of colours than me) complained. So did our daughters who were confined to a patch of lawn on which to play.
I went further. I relaid the lawn and mowed it. I turned the garage into a potting shed and spent more hours studying the ways of indoor plants. I left it to my wife to spray them and, being the foolish “Anyone”, didn’t realise I had become a gardener. My mind turned to greater expanses in which to plant roses.
I pruned them, fed them, sprayed them and foliar-fed them. And then I remember one snowy February staring dementedly through the windows at a row of lurid Megiddos still in bloom and deciding I couldn’t stand the sight of the infernal things. It was time to move.
The mania was still on me. We bought a house in Dorset with an acre and a half of river valley loam, an acre of it lawn. It didn’t stay that way for long. I bought myself a stainless steel fork and spade and set to work on that beautiful black soil. I built six large compost bins and put everything suitable for fermentation in them—and I mean everything (a man whose father made a habit of preferring an earth closet to an indoor WC, to add to the compost bin, isn’t fussy. I wasn’t). The compost thermometer and the worms that congregated by the hundreds proved me right.
In two years I had planted 1,500 roses. Not modern ones, but old Victorian roses that smelt marvellous. I worked like a Trojan. I even made deep beds in the kitchen garden and spent hours in the first of three greenhouses raising onions and tomatoes, you name it, from seed.
But roses came first. I bought an enormous stainless steel sprayer and filled the air with noxious fumes that were guaranteed to kill blackspot, mildew, rust, greenfly, and anything that was fond of roses. That, of course, included me.
Undeterred, I bought a gas mask of a sort and wondered why I couldn’t breathe properly. Of course I couldn’t. The thing absorbed so much spray it blocked up after 15 gallons, although being a fathead “non-gardener”, an “Anyone”, I didn’t realise that.
The old doctor next door did. He had been watching me double and triple dig with increasing concern and one day he took me aside. “If you go on working like that, you’ll kill yourself,” he said. I took his advice and hired a gardener, a delightful, retired man called Mr Denis Amps. Watching Mr D, as I called him, from the safety of the little white greenhouse, working slowly and sensibly among the runner beans, I learnt what a real gardener is. He doesn’t hurl himself into digging like a demented navvy; he takes his time and paces himself. He leans on a hoe or a fence and warms to his own and the soil’s handiwork and then plods on contentedly.
We have now moved back to Cambridge and an acre of garden designed by a woman of taste. She had a gardener, a full-time one. I have one, too. Which means I, being that fathead “Anyone”, can wander round with visitors and a large Havana accepting their compliments for things I no longer do.
All the same, I still have the rose beds I planted here and even Goldfinch, a shrub rose (1907), which was in our first garden and which seems to like travelling. Yes, Anyone Can Garden marvellously on a small scale, but real gardeners are few and far between.