My giddy aunt, a retirement blog about gardening. Now I know I’ve truly retired. And it’s only taken nigh on six years to come to this realisation. I have to admit it’s with some mixed feelings (nothing new for yours truly) that I understand the implications and try and share them with my readers in this blog. Acceptance of one’s lot can be a blessing. Trouble with blessings is that in the wrong hands (mine) they can be, yes, you’ve guessed it, a curse. Why a curse? Because it implies you’ve ceased to strive for something better. A better retirement life? Wow, that’s heavy as we used to say in the 60s.
While it may be clear in these blogs that I’ve constantly been searching for that missing link that will make everything perfect. It’s equally obvious that I’ve not found it, stand little chance of doing so and the concept of perfection exists nowhere on the planet and sure as eggs not in my (or your?) retirement life.
True, when one was a working person the path to happiness, moving towards perfection, seemed a good deal clearer. Better, more interesting work, more money, nice house, new car, happy family. You know the type of thing. We knew we wouldn’t get perfection but the challenge of trying seemed more straightforward. Strangely, for me at least, having this kind of ambition, in a retirement context, has proved more elusive. You might think that with the world being your oyster. Tabla rasa and all that kind of guff, retirement fulfilment would be a morceau de gateaux. Not so, for me, that is.
But gardening, well I quite used to like gardening in my younger days but it was never one of my things. Mostly it was Mrs Summerhouse who put in the spade work. On retiring, my position did not soften, in fact it somewhat hardened. Mrs Summerhouse carried on being our number one gardener.
If anything my view of gardening as best left to someone else, became more fixed when we were running our son’s gardening business. We ran the company employing between two and four gardeners for about two and a half years. The responsibility was quite stressful but we did it because we thought if the boy came back from OZ, where he currently resides, he’d have no job. And somehow, and for certain, this would rebound on us. So we kept it going.
The plus side to having your own gardening business was that whenever a hedge needed cutting, a lawn mowing, a plant moving or planting, we just summoned up one of the gardeners. Truth be told I liked this and felt no shame. Get somebody else to do the gardening and if anything lightweight and creative needed doing, then there was Mrs SH. She even did a bit of garden design for other people.
Perhaps I felt de-skilled. More likely I got to enjoy being physically inactive. Code for lazy, at least on the physical front. There was always the dogs to walk if I needed my guilt assuaging (is that a word?). So it has been for the last five and a half years. Until yesterday.
A word to the wise. Do not tinker outdoors unless you are prepared to go all the way. Yesterday (Thursday – a week exactly after a day clearing out my late mother’s outhouses, I need to be careful at this rate there is a danger that Thursdays will become my physical labour day – shudder at the thought) started with the innocent task of moving just one Hosta.
Hostas are without question my favourite plant. They require so little attention, they’re great to look at and they just appear each year and each year get a little bigger. Apart from the bloody slugs which love Hostas to death, literally, they require minimal effort. My kind of plant. True when they’ve been eaten they look terrible and keeping the bloody slugs off can be challenging (as you can see in one of the photos if you look carefully). In the absence of any gardeners I have to send Mrs SH out to do battle.
So why I chose yesterday to move one Hosta I really can’t say. Four hours later for me and three hours for Mrs SH, I stopped, totally knackered. Pots had been moved, plants re-potted, separated, watered and fertilised, leaves swept up and binned, shrubs pruned, patio, decking, astro-turf (we have no natural grass these days) brushed and generally cleaned up. And after a combined total of seven hours it looked great though I say so myself. In fact we both said so. We should have taken some before and after photos but then there was no before because we didn’t know before we started that we were in fact starting if you see what I mean.
So all we’ve got are a few after photos all containing Archie the Collie (we took more without Archie) who just seemed to find himself in every shot. You’ll have to take my word for it that this, really quite small, garden looked an absolute tip before we started in on it.
But who’d have thought it. Me feeling heaps of satisfaction having spent nearly a day in the garden. We still had to take the dogs for their afternoon walk but we promised ourselves that we would sit out in the garden (something we rarely do which might explain why it had got in such a mess) when we got back with a glass of our own wine. I should have mentioned that the task was made all the nicer by the weather, which was gorgeous. Unfortunately by the time we got back it started to absolutely persist it down. And I mean it came down with a vengeance.
This was annoying in two ways. First, from the lost outdoor (although not indoor) glass of wine perspective and second, because we’d just finished watering everything and fertilised them and which was now being washed through by the bloody rain. I thought to myself, this gardening business is not all it’s cracked up to be.
But let’s not lose the positive essence here. For the second week running I had found my retirement life to be, dare I say it, fulfilling, on account of a day spent engaged in physical labour and the sense of achievement that has gone with it. Funny business this retirement and just a little bit scary.
A final thought – As someone who experiences depression and anxiety, tending plants is the most accessible and simplest way to engage in mindfulness, and just a few minutes each day makes a huge difference to my life.
Not my words but those of James Wong (gardening correspondent) in The Observer supplement last weekend. No wonder I felt good out there. Just a couple of asides to this otherwise inspiring bit of writing. A little cynical, perhaps, but it is currently very fashionable, as a man, to say you suffer from depression and anxiety. Second, this is the last time in a long time I’ll use the mindfulness word in this blog. I feel better now, can’t be doing with too much positiveness. The photos look nice though, see below.
