Man’s world
In which our strong-but-not-silent Southern correspondent reveals that he does indeed converse with plants – but only the posh ones.
Why Joe Bennett will only talk to the poshest of plants
How nice of you to ask. Yes, I talk to my plants. Only I wouldn’t use the word my. The plants at my place are not possessions but companions, fellow astronauts, if you will, adrift with me and the dog and the rest of the planet within the Milky Way, which is in turn adrift within the cosmos, which is in turn adrift within a set of physical principles that the boffins have yet to satisfactorily define despite centuries of pencil-sucking. So yes, I talk to my plants.
For it seems to me that plants and people are together on a cosmic mystery tour, ignorant of where we came from, where we’re going and why we’re going there. We are, as the wise man once said, a band of lonely and sorrowful searchers whose only consolation is to know that we are a band of lonely and sorrowful searchers. And the plants are of that company.
What? No, of course I make no distinctions. Life is life, and there’s an end to it. The sole difference between a man and a plant, between animal and vegetable, between conscious and unconscious, is time. Today’s columnist is tomorrow’s clematis and vice versa. So it seems to me not only polite to have a little natter with our photosynthesising friends, but also sensible, seeing that the tables will be turned in time to come and we’ll be hoping they return the favour.
So just as I talk to my dog, tell him things indeed I wouldn’t tell a trusted lover, or even – gasp! – a fellow gardener, I have many a heart-to-heart with plants. Plants that share this little patch of dirt that I have rented from eternity and labelled home.
Yes, since you ask – and I am ignoring, for the moment, what I took to be a cynical edge to your question – I can indeed name a specific plant with whom I converse. It’s Ginny.
No, obviously, Ginny’s not a botanical name. When holding a conversation one tries not to sound like a textbook. Ginny’s a Virginia creeper, but Ginny does not creep. Ginny does the opposite of creeping. Every year as we tilt once more towards the sun and the days lengthen and the soils warm, I go out to talk to her. “Ginny, my darling,” I say, “are you ready to go at it once again?”
The it in question is a wall. But it is not any old wall. It is the world’s ugliest wall, a monstrous thing of concrete blocks that drenches the heart in deep aesthetic gloom. So at the foot of the wall I built a wooden box and I lined it with polythene to keep the moisture in and I cut slits in the polythene to let the moisture out, and I filled the box, regardless of expense, with sack after sack of potting mix and I planted Ginny within it and I urged her to reduce by one wall’s worth the amount of ugliness in the world. And she went to it.
Her empire stretches every year and the wall diminishes. “Thank you, Ginny,” I say to her each autumn, “thank you, my darling, my interplanetary companion, my equal and my friend.”
And I feed her fertilisers and I comfort her with pea straw and if any wicked weeds seek to establish footing in her private box, I rip them from the soil and tear them into bits in front of her to demonstrate my kinship and my love.
What? Oh don’t be silly. Weeds are weeds.