Did you know 27% of male heart-attack victims are struck down while cutting the grass ?? What, you didn’t ?? That’s because it's not true, I just made it up. But I bet the real figure is huge.
I recently spent a (what was supposed to be lazy) Bank Holiday off chopping down a tree, laying slabs and getting covered in mud and cement dust as a result. What the garden now looks like isn’t that much different to how it started either. According to another recent bit of mysteriously-obtained statistics, 2.2 million of the new homes built in Britain this year will not have a private garden. This is because developers are building lots of flats and - I never would have guessed this - the likelihood of having a garden is greater for larger detached dwellings than flats.
I believe there is another way of looking at this. If people are paving over their front lawns and selling their back gardens to Bryant and Barratt, it must mean they value a car-parking space and an extra bit of dosh more than they value spending half their weekend huffing and puffing behind a lawnmower. Clearly, some people plainly don’t like having a garden, and I can understand why. It’s because once you start gardening, there is no end, no point at which you can say, “It’s finished”, unlike when you’re painting or redecorating the front room, for example.
First of all, there’s the bothersome business of choosing from a vast array of plants, all of which have horrendously-complicated Latin names so that the people who work in garden centres can laugh in your face when you get it wrong. Flustered, you will make a panic purchase of something that is pink and won’t grow in your particular garden because it’s not north-facing, or the soil is too acidic, or the wind’s too strong. And even if it does grow, it will turn out to be either a twig, or something so rapacious that within five months it will have eaten your lawn, your shed, your pets and probably your children as well.
First, though, it will want to eat your satellite dish. All plants do this. No matter how hard you encourage them to grow in one direction, they will make a beeline for the dish, so that in the middle of "Doctor Who", you will suddenly get a notice saying no signal is being received. This means you have to go outside armed with a pair of secateurs and some dynamite. Well, I would.
We have had some weeds that, in their desperation to get at our satellite dish, brutally murdered three of my Mum’s rose plants that lay in its path. It used them as a launch pad, until the poor things couldn’t cope with the weight and simply snapped. Gravel does not do this. And anyway, once you embark on a project such as a garden, there is simply no end. Next thing you know, you’ll be in a greenhouse, making Harry Potter-style potions with a pestle and mortar, and not sleeping at night because of the prospect of greenfly. Nobody ever loses sleep over their Wickes timber decking.
The other thing I’ve learning in my short career as a gardener is that everything you want to grow dies, and everything that you wish was dead grows like wildfire. It’s like "The Killing Fields" out there sometimes. But let’s just say you do have a garden, you don’t mind dragging your lawnmower through the house every weekend, and that you like being up to your elbows in mud and mortar.
Fine, but because you are an amateur, your garden is likely to be fairly small, and because you are British you think pansies are pretty, so you will eventually end up with something that looks like a sponsored roundabout in Milton Keynes. There are some great gardens in this country, but yours isn’t going to one of them. Yours is going to look like it was planted and maintained by Ozzy Osbourne.
And it’s not somewhere you can ever sit and relax or have summer barbecues or parties either, because every time you try, you will notice a bit of moss that needs removing, or a beetle that needs spraying, or a weed that needs beheading. So you’ll be up and down a jet-propelled pogo stick, until one day, while doing a bit of hedge trimming, you will probably cut through the cable and wind up getting electrocuted.
Just make sure you stress in your will that you want to see Alan Titchmarsh get the pants sued off him.