Managing that patch of land behind the house is a loathsome chore, argues David James

Owning a garden is something we’re told we should aspire to. When, as little children, we draw idealised images of the perfect house, with four windows and a door, a chimney letting out curls of pencil smoke, we spend as much time drawing the green garden, with pretty flowers smiling around its edges. These images are rooted in our imaginations, fully resistant to the weedkiller of experience.

Because it’s all a lie. If you own a garden then you have to live with failure.

We visit garden centres like we visit gyms: we hope they have the answers to this incipient feeling of inadequacy, and for a moment they do, as we pile up our outsized trolleys with organic pest killers (which never work), and flowering things that are doomed to die within days.

And it’s within days that the reality dawns again: that an English suburban garden is the most overpriced patch of land there is, only surpassed in its exaggerated value by the space it takes up in our brains.

In the winter it depresses us: rain dripping from every rusting piece of garden furniture we bought from Argos one delusional afternoon in February. In the spring, like Frankenstein’s monster, it stirs again, reminding us of the costs it will incur, both financially and emotionally. In the summer it grows everywhere, unfettered, the noise of birdsong drowning out the Heathrow flight path, the thickening foliage smothering the sirens from the streets.

It’s estimated that the British spend over £16 billion a year on gardens (or nearly £700 per family). Imagine the West End plays you could see with that money (about two, actually, but you take my point), or meals out, or bottles of good wine, the fine cheeses, the tailored shirts, the Church’s shoes. Such happy things to cherish, unencumbered by physical effort, or hourly reminders of how much you’ve aged since you last took your dibber in hand to do some hole plunging. Imagine volunteering to weed, to elect to try to tempt climbers to inch their way up trellises, or to choose to hoe, sew, prune and dig.

It’s a bucolic self-flagellation which condemns you to never again be able to sit in a garden on a summer’s day without seeing the work not done, the borders growing wild, the grass that needs cutting.

But if gardens are too softcore for you, then you can always try having an allotment – that most punishing of late middle-age pursuits. I tried it for two years, and I felt like a serf to my own stupidity. When you attempt to grow fruit and vegetables you spend much of your time on your knees, a symbolic posture of servitude and defeat.  The ludicrousness of “grow your own” in this period of late-stage capitalism is reinforced every time you visit a supermarket. The shelves laugh at you. The reduced-price bags of 20p onions fart in your general direction. Because those 12 knobbly, spotty, lumpy, shrunken potatoes you’ve spent months seeding, chitting, and putting into their own drills, blanketed in finely raked soil like little babies cosseted in their cots, have cost more, per tuber, than a dozen oysters at Corrigan’s. Worse, they taste no better than a bag of Peruvian spuds from Tesco’s that are, literally, cheaper than chips.

This is an extract from a longer piece which appears in Idler 86, Sept/Oct 2022.

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