Forget the green-fingered snobs who say a balcony can’t be a garden
Earlier this summer I wrote about the unexpectedly steadying experience of growing plants on the windswept, north-facing balcony of my partner’s flat. Lockdown in March caught me unprepared, without much in the way of compost, pots or plants, so I improvised, planting peas that emerged from their pods with vestigial roots, seeds from a supermarket melon, an elderly packet of chilli seeds and some equally venerable dill.
These makeshift efforts proved unexpectedly successful: the peas shot up the string that was all I could provide by way of support. Sixteen chillies, eight melon seedlings and three dill made the transition from window sill to balcony. Without much hope that they would survive the unpromising conditions, I found myself chatting to them in gloomy moments, urging them to thrive – which, thanks to the glorious weather, they did.
The sight of all this flourishing green life was such a welcome antidote to viral melancholy that we took to having an evening drink in what I incautiously referred to as the “balcony garden” – an ambitious bit of terminology for which I was sharply reproved by a reader. “Supermarket peas and an ancient packet of chilli seeds ... is not ‘gardening’. How ridiculous,” she wrote.
Reproved but unchastened, I persisted. This week there landed on my desk a handsome little book from Notting Hill Editions: James Fenton’s A Garden from A Hundred Packets of Seed, in which I find this: “My definition ... of a garden must include ... morning glories grown on a fire escape, high up above the street. Mustard and cress sown on a washcloth, Virginia stock in an old crab shell, or a row of hyacinths in glasses – all these count as gardens, in my understanding of the word, along with Great Dixter, Powis Castle, and Versailles.”
Thus the former Oxford professor of poetry confirms that my balcony greenery is a garden, after all. Not that I was ever seriously in doubt: since I first wrote about it, the peas have produced fat pods, the chillies are in flower; I do not anticipate fruit from the melons, but I expect at any moment a gaudy melon-flower.
Gardening, like so many pleasant human activities, has its dark recesses of snobbery and unkindness. But in lockdown, distanced from almost everyone I love, the fizzing of the green fuse has produced an unexpected spark of elemental joy.
“Where shall we go on
holiday?” says my partner, R. He has been shielding and doesn’t fancy getting on a plane. A staycation, then – whatever that means. Is it staying at home, as in Britain; or home, as in SE10? My usual comfort holiday is the tiny west-country hovel where I stayed as a small child. It is booked until midnovember. The first place that comes up on Airbnb has a composting lav. “Going on holiday has to be nicer than staying at home, doesn’t it?” I say plaintively. R, who was educated at the sort of schools often cited as splendid preparation for prison, is unconvinced. “It’ll be a break,” he says, heartily.
Alternatively, we could stay at home, avoid the Magaluf-style crowds on every beach, the mad motorhome gridlock and the mysteriously inadequate kitchen equipment of every holiday home, however fancy, and glory in the astonishing luck of living in a world heritage site, with a kitchen drawer full of sharp knives.