Millennial Gardener

“Hello, and welcome to Gardeners’ World.” 

               Six weekly words from Monty Don that fill me with excitement. 

                      My weekend starts right here. 

It’s Friday night. The housework is done and the fridge is full. I have no weddings to attend, no airport pick-ups to complete, and no job applications to submit. I don’t know where my phone is and I don’t care. Tomorrow I will go to The Garden Centre: my only appearance beyond my property’s perimeter. I won’t buy anything, plants-wise. I will be there ‘for inspiration’. The only permitted extravagance will be a couple of cappuccinos and a couple of croissants in the café, where my couple’s conversation will be of clematis, crocosmia, camellia, and chrysanthemum. Pot to pot, bed to bed, border to border. 

I am a Millennial Gardener and I married one too… 

Dirty at thirty    

I’ve never been hit by a bus, but last week my wife and I completely overhauled our garden, and I feel like I might as well have been. I’m in agony. It took fifty hours over four days, involving three conversations with adjoining neighbors over adjoining fences, two car journeys to collect supplies, and baking one homemade fruit loaf to enjoy during our self-allotted tea breaks.

 From which, as the days went by, our knees increasingly struggled to rise up again — 

• You’re dealing with someone who’s run half-marathons in his time here. 
• I’m an ex-personal trainer and amateur boxer. 
• I’ve played two-hour Rock & Roll sets to audiences up and down the UK, night after night, with a band that recorded an album over eight days, surviving on little other than two hours’ sleep and the fumes from an empty bottle of tequila. 
• I accidentally converted a seven-mile ramble into a 30-mile expedition in the Lake District when I missed the turn-off back to the … pub. 
• And I once worked for 36 corporate days in a row preparing for a trial in the High Court of England & Wales. 

But I did all that in my twenties, a time full of exciting and youthful debauchery. The decade in which I’m now horrified to find myself in is one of aches and pains, indigestion tablets, weather forecasts, early nights, and compost-covered knees. I should’ve watched for the warning signs. 

A passion project

Yet, looking down from my window at that garden as I write these words, I am proud. We’ve taken a sad patch of overgrown turf — in the middle of a newly-built estate inhabited by our generational comrades — to a flourishing hideaway from what we’re conditioned to believe is reality.  

Unlike my legal career where the absence of a physical work product left a hole where satisfaction should’ve grown, the garden rewards us with fruits of our labor. Quite literally – our apple tree is about to burst and I’ve spied some baby strawberries hiding from the local birds. 

Our border plots are packed with hidden references to personal memories shared with lost relatives and absent friends. Our sweet peas climb in tribute to my granddad. Our fresh mint multiplies with a nod to childhood Sundays, foraging with my dad for lunch condiments. A peace Buddha keeps watch from the corner, grounded at the base of a crimson tree with love-shaped leaves. This year’s display of dahlias will be a psychedelic wonderland, and our self-built vegetable bed is our own slice of hippie self-sufficiency. The magnolia tree we wrestled from the jaws of demise is a reminder: if there is passion, even the most clueless and misguided forms can lead to greatness. 

Don’t fence me in …

I don’t understand why gardening has such a geriatric reputation. That’s like saying cooking is boring. Sure, cooking is boring – if you’re one of those people whose craziest culinary flirtation is heating up a frozen lasagne. But, like any pursuit, artistic or otherwise, gardening is a blank canvas buzzing with endless creative potential. 

Yes, it’s a place for solitude and wholesome reflection. But it’s so much more than that. It’s a source of constant connection to sit, unbothered by the pressures of a fast, frightening world. 

It’s a place for entertaining, strung, as it is, with festoon lights, like a small stage at Glastonbury, over a fire pit which was, last weekend, surrounded by my wife, my best friend of twenty years, his wonderful girlfriend, and me. Draining bottles of champagne and sharing cigars, playing mad games and acoustic guitars. Remembering times of old as a Two, and now as a Four, making plans for times new. Toasting marshmallows and friendship.

I never thought I’d find myself replacing the vodka-swilling nightclub promise of a Friday night with the dulcet tones of Monty Don. Just like I never believed I’d swap the supple collagen of twenty-five for the damaged cartilage of thirty-one. But with the slow wilting of the body seems to have bloomed an ameliorating of the mind. As we sat and drank and smoked and played and reminisced and conspired, I think our little share of nature, in some way, saved us all.