A Woman and Her Garden

 There’s a fair bit of gardening heritage in my family background - on my maternal side there have been farmers and hop growers, and on my paternal side, market gardeners and agricultural labourers. Both my aunts were great gardeners, yet their middle sister, my Mum, seemed to have dodged that particular horticultural gene because she is to gardening what Kali, the Indian goddess of destruction, is to keeping world peace. My father wanted to follow his parents into farming but they said as he was the eldest of their three sons, he HAD to do a PROPER apprenticeship in a PROPER trade, so he ended up being a master carpenter and builder. In his forties, though, he became a mushroom farmer, and kudos to him for giving it a very good go and fulfilling his wish to farm even though it did all go pear-shaped in the end.

 I have the gardening gene (my brother does not), and I can remember from a very young age being involved in sowing, planting, growing, and harvesting. It’s been a big part of my life, and for that I am (mostly) glad. 

When perusing our village book swap shelter, then, I was delighted to find this little treasure:

…and I spent a couple of entertaining hours reading it. It is full of gardening hints, tips and snippets, some very useful, some very odd, and some downright bonkers. It is a bit historical, a bit folklorish and a bit modern, and is threaded through with anecdotes and observations from gardeners across the ages. For example: 

‘A man should never plant a garden larger than his wife can take care of,’ cited by one TH Everett, date unknown. Nice bit of humour, there. My, how this girl gardener laughed. Of course, TH Everett could well be a Tessa Harriet, a Teresa Hermione, or Tina Helena, making a tongue-in-cheek aside after having spent all day tending the space her husband constantly refers to as ‘his’ garden, whilst he was distracted from joining her and wielding a spade by a very important football match or some other such manly shizzle. But I somehow doubt it. 

Or how about this: An addiction to gardening is not all bad when you consider all the other choices in life,’ from Cora Lea Bell. How true. I think gardening is probably one of my addictions. I don’t drink alcohol, smoke or gamble, or indulge in any form of drug taking, but I bet gardening beats them all into a cocked hat, and I offer the wisdom of one Jane Loudon , writer of ‘Gardening for Ladies’ (1840) as my evidence:

‘She will not only have the satisfaction of seeing the garden being created, as it were, by her own hands, but she will find her health and spirits wonderfully improved by the exercise, and by the reviving smell of the fresh earth.’

And there’s today’s scientists thinking they have discovered something new in the benefits of gardening. 🙄

Talking of scientists, this is from The Compleat Herbal by Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656-1708):

‘A certain gentleman of Siena being wonderfully taken and delighted with the Smell of Basil, was wont very frequently to take the powder of the dry herb, and sniff it up his Nose but in a short Time he turn’d mad and died; and his head being opened by surgeons, there was a Nest of Scorpions in his Brain.’

Heavens to Murgatroyd, dear Reader(s)! What calumny! What a to do!! And what lessons shall we learn from this horrific tale of herbal woe? First, keep basil in your pesto, your pasta sauces and on your pizza, not up your nose. Secondly, that gardening, as our Cora Lea Bell pointed out, is actually not at all bad as far as addictions go, and thirdly, never trust a 17th century surgeon. Nor a French social commentator, come to that.

And finally, a little poem, author unknown…

‘Four seeds you have to sow,

One for the pheasant, one for the crow,

One to rot and one to grow.’

Whoever they were, I bet they never grew courgettes…