Art of mending storm-hit greenhouse a real pane

IT never started as a work of art. I just wanted to grow tomatoes and such like inside its antique glass panes.

But time, nature and storms have turned my greenhouse into a bona fide cultural exhibit.

In fact, I’ve a good mind to enter it for the Turner Prize. It has as much artistic innovation as Tracey Emin’s unmade bed, and you can faff about in it.

Well, what’s left of it.

Not all its original panes remain – but that’s the point. Gales took away three big panels on one side, and I replaced them with a sheet of plywood, painted white but now badly eroded.

On t’other side, another storm smashed three more panes, and I replaced them with a sheet of Perspex donated by brother John. That, too, was blown out and broken into five pieces.

I gathered them up from next door’s allotment, and glued them together. That’s still holding up.

Next victims, three top panes, one of which I rescued almost intact from the potato patch (as will be) and two have been er, retro-fitted with other spare bits of Perspex. They almost fit.

Yet another was broken by a falling tree. Not a real one, but a mushroom table hewn from logs, blown over by the wind. Still gaping empty, like the small triangular pane at the back.

All in all, or mostly in all, as things stand, it’s not a pretty sight. But art isn’t supposed to be, and Paul’s Panes can stand with Damien Hirst’s dead shark as a tribute to creative endeavour.

I may need a turnstile for the sale of tickets, but the other allotmenteers would only be jealous. Their plastic sheds defy the weather, unlike my greenhouse.