Repetition

favourite spade

I was reading back over my diary the other day, nodding and clucking as I relived all those lost but faintly repetitive weekends. There were a few meaningful moments (the day I got my new edge trimmers, the time I though I'd successfully weeded out the nasty creeping grass), but most of the diary was rather repetitive. The living scoreboard of repeated cricket defeats accompanied by national cricketing despair certainly was. The diary was full of gardening lists, but on closer inspection they all seemed to be the same.

It's to be expected in a gardening diary. All gardeners live with the natural repetition of the seasons, half knowing what to expect, and half wondering what will change. We remember the last summer drought, wise after the event, and the problems with the wind last spring. Each winter we wait for the first frost, each spring we look for the first spring bulbs to flower.

an unstaked dahlia

I've now realised that my diary is full of repeated seasonal promises. I always make my autumn promise to remember to stake the dahlias, just when they've turned into a total 'flop'. Each mid summer I promise to keep the pots tidier, as they get forgotten in a cover of fallen gum tree leaves. When I'm clearing in winter I promise to be more organised, and to remember that plant sizes in meters are in meters.

The gardening tasks I talk about in the diary are pretty repetitive, too. I'm always talking about edges, weeding, and digging. A reader who skims the diary surface would wonder why I bother to talk at great length about such boring activities, and so often, too. Perhaps these three great gardening activities need further explanation.

Weeding

Weeding is a gardening activity which is pretty basic. Everyone knows what their local weeds are, and that cute phrase 'a weed is merely a plant in the wrong place' has little credibility with real gardeners. Favourite weeds are nurtured - like the variegated mallows which I insist on growing from seed. Other weeds are tolerated, controlled and very occasionally exterminated. Two classic weeds here in the garden are gorse and broom, resulting respectively from a 120 year old gorse hedge and some equally ancient nursery plantings of wild broom.

I have two methods of weed control - fingers, and newspaper covered with mulch. If I can't winkle that weed out between index finger and thumb, then I fall back on suffocation. I am a quasi-organic gardener - for me, chemical spraying is rarely an option (if the situation is desperate I delegate). I hate the laziness implied in spraying to get rid of mere weeds.

weed

Digging

Weeding goes hand in hand with digging in my garden developments. I am proud to announce that all the borders here have been hand dug and cleared of weeds by hand. My friends talk about spraying (twice!) the shape of the new border, then covering with newspaper and peastraw and digging little planting holes. Instant gardening - I hate it!

My digs have stretched out over many days, with much dirt getting on my clothes and under my fingernails. My borders have minds and shapes of their own, often changing direction to gobble up a tree. My favourite shovel is a spade, and if the ground is too hard I leap on it with both feet at the same time - rather energetic for a mature gardener.

There are a lot of sweeping lawns here in the garden. I'm always having to do the 'edges', or I'm proudly boasting that I've done the 'edges' and that they look great. All gardeners know instinctively what 'edges' are and why they are 'done'.

The Edge of Obsession

To the non-gardener obsession with edges must be a real puzzle. Stones, camouflaged with edging plants, are my latest plan to organise my edges, and so backbones of river stones curve and loop around all the lawns. The lawn mower man has clear instructions to cut as close to the stones as possible.

a trowel left lying around

The trouble is that the edging plants now camouflage the stones too well, and the lawn mower man, rightly not wanting to mow any stones, leaves a strip of grass unmown. This results in failure - the edges are 'not done'.

Enough of this endless repetition. It's time I got out there in the real garden. I could do some weeding, or digging, or do the edges...