COLIN HOGG
COLIN’S NO ACE OF SPADES, BUT HE IS HANDY WITH A TROWEL. SADLY, NEITHER WILL GET HIS GARDEN TO GROW!
In the depths of lockdown last year, along with many other restless New Zealanders, we picked up new hobbies. My wife’s turned out to be indoor plants, while mine was bricklaying, both being the sorts of pastimes that can make a permanent mark on your surroundings if you’re not very careful. We weren’t very careful.
A tempting pile of bricks had come with the house we bought when we moved back to Auckland last year and it was the sight of them that got me thinking about connecting with my inner bricklayer. So now our lawns are crowned with two impressive, if slightly wobbly, raised brick-walled gardens, the largest and sunniest of which my wife immediately claimed as hers.
I’m left with my first bricklaying effort, the garden that doesn’t get quite enough sun to grow much more so far than a few moody greens and a vigorous patch of parsley. All the same, I fear a growing contest is about to break out, but while I might be able to build a garden, I’m at a serious disadvantage when it comes to the growing side of them.
My wife, though, is a natural when it comes to nature. She can make things grow just by staring at them, while I never quite manage to raise anything big enough to cast a shadow. Though, of course, I refuse to see this as any sort of handicap. The main thing I have on my side is persistence. Possibly, it’s the only thing I have on my side.
Tragically, a little research has revealed to me that men may not actually have been born to garden, no matter how much we keep at it and how big our cabbages might occasionally be. Growing things in the backyard has never really been a very large part of the average chap’s genetic make-up, even if it appeared to be. We were originally designed to be hunters, while women stayed home and handled the salads – and the babies, of course.
Things have evolved a little since those days – most men being not so inclined to hunt. The urge to hunt has, perhaps, become the urge to mow. The urge to grow isn’t really an urge inside men. If there’s any urging about growing, it probably comes more from the outside.
I grew up in a world full of suburban backyards leaping with large vegetables, though that was in the days when
New Zealanders were a lot more self-sufficient than we are now. Also, it was the days when the women did the inside things and the men did the outside ones, even if they didn’t really want to.
I’m not sure my father ever wanted to grow vegetables, though he became pretty good at it. It’s just that, in the old days, a man wasn’t judged to be quite a man if he couldn’t show off an impressive range of greens.
Right now, I’m considering taking an unpredictable approach to the great garden contest. It will be a brave approach for a man, but, for reasons known best to themselves, flowers really seem to make an effort under my sporadic care. And I like flowers. Pansies, particularly. It’ll be hard to beat a garden of pansies.
‘A man wasn’t judged to be quite a man if he couldn’t show off a range of greens’