A little time in the garden could go a long way

Life comes first, which is why we’re in lockdown. But quality of life matters too. So does mental health. We don’t go far enough in helping people physically distance from each other outside, and sometimes we go too far.

It’s spring. Our parks, dotted with solitary people, look like a chess game nearing its end. One can’t sit on a bench alone or with family. Silent, upon a peak in Darien (actually, high atop Christie Pits but it doesn’t sound as glam) I stood gazing at a beautiful spread of what looked like white-frilled bluebells and realized that I was “lingering,” very much the kind of thing police don’t want you to do.

So I left. I had been hungry for flowers because nurseries and garden shop deliveries are not considered essential, even though the latter is often an outdoor extension of grocery stores.

You can buy a few measly indoor pot plants but that’s it. No plants for you.

By now, anyone lucky enough to have a bit of ground space or balcony containers to fill would have been happily at work at home — “green space, muddy fingers, bent-tined forks, tangled twine and worn-out clothes,” as gardener Sam Leith has written — rather than making ill use of too much free time outdoors, or, like me, gloomily zigzagging along streets and prowling through parks. Gardens are a timeout for grown-ups.

In 2019, gardeners would have been buying topsoil, compost, worm castings and mulch. They might have wanted, sooner and later, herbs, fruit and vegetable seedlings, shrubs, saplings, ground cover, annuals, perennials, fencing, fertilizer, shovels, hoes, rakes, planters, gloves, kneelers, mowers, secateurs, saws, stakes, trowels, spades and many other things needed for the borderland between home and sidewalk.

It’s a huge industry shut down at the height of its best season. This past month, the New York

Times reports, growers in the Netherlands destroyed 400 million flowers, including 140 million tulip stems in the season that matters most, March to May. While all that beauty was being plowed under, the nation’s most famous garden, the Keukenhof, was shut down.

Stores and landscapers are praying Ontario will change its mind and designate the entire industry as essential — flower greenhouses are rated safe — just as the Quebec government has done.

The city of Toronto is still planting trees for free in every garden, although it will run later than usual, so book your commemorative coronavirus sapling now.

Again, government decisions are well-intentioned but don’t work in theory.

Why isn’t Yonge Street open for walkers, or its sidewalks at least widened? I can’t walk along Bloor because it’s a magnet for maskless people who jog, linger and block. Remember the terrible Yonge Street incel van attack that killed women walking? With cars banned, we’d be safe as well as distant.

Spacing magazine, always fresh, suggests visible, tangible separators on streets, GPS technology to direct people to emptier places, opening up park perimeters to blend more with our narrow sidewalks, creating braided paths with trees and three surfaces — limestone, asphalt and concrete — to welcome people to walk separately, and 15 km/h speed limits on small streets.

I write this because, like everyone else, I am not supposed to leave my home. We’re all grateful to those who follow the rules.

But there’s a part of me that says the hell with this, I talk to no one new, I’m sick of baking bread and sewing untidy face patches using elastic removed from ancient fitted sheets, it isn’t wartime and outside beckons.

I don’t exercise. I have always found pure exercise stupid and pointless. It’s lonely, joggers are now regarded as selfish, it requires awful clothing, and while your body slims, your face withers more than gravity would insist.

The key is to exercise by doing something externally productive, and gardening is the best example of that.

You are entitled not to do a damn thing during the lockdown.

Go ahead, teens, make TikTok videos putting on Goth makeup while voicing John Mulaney standup. Build a model of the CN Tower using cardboard toilet rolls.

If you’re a sports commentator, do like Andrew Cotter, a Brit working from home, liveaction tweeting as his dogs, Olive and Mabel, compete in the speed-eating event, or two-man bone theft. He narrates the journey of urban pigeons pecking at cobblestones for seeds, crumbs, and bits of old vomit from Saturday night, good fun.

But many of us are more restless. We seek quality of life, if not better than before, then certainly a fresh way of hunting for it.

And remember. This is just a rehearsal for hard times ahead. If we can’t fight this, we can’t fight climate change.