Man’s world
The gardening gloves come off as our steadfast knight with shiny trowel rides to the defence of gardeners up and down this land.
Joe Bennett defends the honour of gardeners everywhere
Oh I stood up for you, don’t you worry. I went into bat for you. I donned the pads and gloves of rhetoric, and the abdominal protector of wit, and I strode to the crease to play an innings on your behalf.
I won’t pretend I wasn’t nervous. But there is right and there is wrong in this world, and it matters which you choose.
There is no need to thank me. Truly, no need at all. I did not go into bat for you in the hope of receiving through the mail a dozen clinking reds, preferably shiraz. No, I did it because it was right and there’s an end to it. Virtue is its own reward.
It is possible, I suppose, when I describe how I went into bat for you, and what I went into bat for you against, that you will be overwhelmed with gratitude and feel compelled to wrap a ribbon round a dozen shiraz, say, and wing them my way. And if so, well, I think we’d agree it would be the act of a churl and an ingrate to send them back. But please do not feel compelled.
It happened in a local café. The gentleman and I are mere acquaintances. We met by chance.
He asked what I had planned for the afternoon and I said I was going to knock up my monthly love letter to the gardeners of New Zealand, and he paused a moment when I said that, stilled by what I took for admiration, and then he said, and I quote, “What?”
“My monthly love letter to the gardeners of New Zealand. It’s a column,” I added as I saw him boggling, “in a prestigious magazine. About gardening.” “Gardening!” he said. I wish I could convey on paper the little shower of spittle that accompanied the word and with it the change of facial colour that stole over him, as if a thundercloud had slid beneath the skin.
Despite the ferocity of his response, I chose to play a dead verbal bat. “Yes,” I said, “gardening. The magazine is perhaps the most prestigious of all the…”
“Gardening,” he bellowed, and I found myself looking around for a defibrillator – the livid cheek, the bulging eye… It seemed that we were heading rapidly for what is known in Spain as Avenida Apoplexia.
“Gardening is futility defined,” he exclaimed. “Every gardener is a suburban Sisyphus, pointlessly pushing a rock up a hill. Gardening,” and here I could see him groping for the killer metaphor, the one that would rip through my dead bat defence and deliver a stinging blow to the abdominal protector of wit, a blow that would make me sink to my knees and beg for a cup of poison, “gardening is like washing the car.”
“What?” I said, and I meant it to sting.
But he was too far down the Avenida of the Purpled Cheek to hear. “Wash a car and it just gets dirty again. Same with gardening. Mow the lawn and back it grows. Pull the weeds and back they come. Never was so much time wasted to so little effect. Concrete every backyard and be done with it.” “Pshaw,” I said. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard me say pshaw. I don’t like to brag but let me just tell you I say it for keeps.
And without even waiting to see the effect of my pshaw upon him, I turned on that splendidly rotatory anatomical feature my heel and left the café proud of the innings I had played on your behalf and giving no thought whatsoever to shiraz.