Mary’s new career – from socialite to prison warder

Whether you have been cooped up in a tower block or living in the centre of a rural beauty spot, one of the great problems for married lockdowners has been the absence of mental privacy.

PRE-COVID-19, Mary spent at least one third of her week at book launches, gallery openings and assorted London soirées. She insisted that at least one of us should be ‘in the swim’. I was more than happy not to be in the swim and instead to concentrate on experiments in ecological restoration, a new-found interest in growing rare root vegetables and generally mimicking the life of an 18th-century parson naturalist.

Mindful of the diktat of Michael Pollan, ‘Eat food, not too much, mostly plants,’ as I toiled away, I was aware that if anyone was virtue-signalling it was clearly me. My mother always used to assure me that I was more than justified in taking this approach to life: ‘You keep the show on the road while Mary is gallivanting.’

But now Mary has stopped gallivanting and has turned the beam of her attention onto me.

She announced she has been conducting ‘time and motion’ analyses of my outside work: ‘For example, why do I keep hearing that maddening noise of a watering can being repeatedly filled up? Can’t you use a hose?’

To me, the tinkling sound of water running into galvanised metal is an agreeable one and has always signified progress. I explained that the ecologist far prefers the physical effort of filling and carrying an unwieldy can to any profligate spraying with a high-tech hose. The fine-rose method of watering is a more sustainable way of preserving finite village water supplies.

But my productivity-driven wife was sceptical. ‘Are you sure it’s not “display working”?’ she asked nastily.

I find that even light irrigation of my rich organic soil causes a flush of earthworms to hurry towards each mini-oasis. Like patrons of a drive-by Mcdonald’s opening up during lockdown, these are closely followed by the arrival of fast-food-seeking moles. The latter can find scant sustenance in the neighbouring corn prairies, where the only sign of life, apart from the crop itself, is the human being in the 40-foot-boom sprayer.

‘But why are you still in that area?’ Mary’s voice later rang out as she came through the undergrowth towards me. ‘You finished watering hours ago.’

Pre-lockdown, Mary didn’t enter the garden. On the few days when she was at home, she would call from a window. Now she was getting far too interested in my work – invading my space, as it were.

I said, ‘No gardener welcomes this sort of disturbance when he is communing with Gaia. What you don’t understand, Mary, is that I am existing in a state of sacred time and you insist on pulling me back into the profane.’

‘Sorry, Giles. But I am a busy woman. What exactly are you doing?’

Once again, I felt over-questioned. But when forced to think about what I was doing, I explained that, through patient observation, I had discovered that the moles’ trademark surface-tunnelling, which resembles a Lilliputian earthquake, occurs roughly every three hours.

‘It means that, if I can be here at the right time, I can rugby-tackle them and release them humanely.’

‘And how many have you caught so far?’

‘None yet … using this technique. Although I could try the Indonesian spear-fisherman technique…’

Mary argued that there wasn’t ‘time’ for this approach to gardening.

Then there was the incident of the watering of the road. Seeing my invigilator’s incredulous face looking down at me from an upper window, I explained that, because of the dry weather, the house martins would find it impossible to repair and build their nests without mud. Hence I was watering a pothole in the road to provide a lifeline for the next generation. I told her, ‘To quote E O Wilson, “What is the point of humans prospering if we cannot bring the rest of life with us?”’

Nor has she appreciated my daily ritual of the Treading of the Slow Heaps. This involves waiting until the slow heaps – garden waste – are dry and brittle and then treading the twigs into the ground to replicate the action of the hooves of prehistoric herbivores such as the aurochs. I need do this only through the one right of way through our land.

I appreciate that many of my outside projects are opaque and difficult for Mary to comprehend. There is an art to creating a wildlife garden and mere neglect will not always do the trick. To Mary, a doctor’s daughter from Northern Ireland, a garden is something with a lawn and rose beds and, essentially, something you should be able to access. And herein lies the misunderstanding, since I consider the garden to be habitat.

But there is good news. Mary happened to ‘throw up’, during an internet search, an article about Slow Gardening, which appeared to her to endorse my modus vivendi. Reading of this movement, ‘rooted in Gestalt’, she learned that Slow Gardeners are to be applauded for their determination to ‘savour’ everything they do on their land, using all their senses. And that ‘participants must be celebrated for the integrity and sensitivity of their slow procedures’. I sense the dawning of a paradigm shift in Mary’s attitude. She has always been highly suggestible.

I had never heard of the Slow Garden movement, but clearly my best chance of continuing with my 18th-century lifestyle is for me to proclaim that I am an adherent.