Green Manalishi

It is one of those diamond-bright April mornings: T-shirt weather in the Sun, Arctic in the shade.  This afternoon the wind is expected to pick up, rain is likely to drift in and turn to hail.  Thunderstorms are predicted.  This is spring in the UK.  However you are dressed when you leave home, you will spend some of the day too hot, some too cold and always you will get wet.  No amount of pre-planning will keep you dry.

We live on a little green dot on the map within which England is wet, Wales is wetter, Northern Ireland is wetter still and Scotland is probably the wettest place in the entire world.  This whole nation radiates out from London in concentric bands of damp.  By the time you reach the Scottish Highlands, the men have all abandoned trousers on the grounds that they are always wet from the knees down, and taken to wearing plaid skirts.  (The sporran is nothing more than a vestigial mould growth.)

I, myself, live in a part of the country that appears to function as the nation’s sump.  For most of us at this time of year, gardening boils down to washing the duckboards, but the time is coming when everything outside the window turns green – particularly on the inside of the shed.  The general rule is, if it isn’t rotting from the root up, it will need cutting back.  If it needs cutting back, it will injure you.

Secateurs are the instrumentum diei for spring gardening.  You will find them, rusted, at the back of the garden shed in April and, with the regular application of WD40, you will be able to operate them by mid-May, at which time you will be able to remove branches up to the thickness of your thumb (and, for the unwary, your actual thumb.)  If you do not actually excise your digit, you will trap it.  The fastest growing item in the springtime garden is always the blood-blister… except for the lawn.

This is the time of the year when the front lawn will have grown by the time you have pushed the mower round from the back. Dandelions and daisies lengthen quicker than a schoolboy’s legs (although, unlike schoolboys, if you chop them off they will just grow back at double speed.)  You have two choices with a lawn: keep it long and full of weeds, or keep it short and full of mud.  In real life, lawn mowers have only two settings: ‘light trim’ and ‘scalp’.  ‘Light trim’ achieves nothing except letting the midges out to play, whilst ‘scalp’ lifts the lawn out in giant clods and spits them into your shoe.  As most lawns provide a half-inch covering of vegetation for a six inch layer of aggregate, this will be launched through your windows, greenhouse and lower legs.  If you want to fill in the resulting ‘craters’ with grass, you will need to fill them first with a blend of finely sifted compost and sand dusted with seed and fertilizer, and water at least twice daily.  Alternatively, if you want to fill them with weeds, just turn your back on them for five minutes.

Most importantly, do not worry: in April, moonless, crystal-clear nights can be very dark and when that happens, your garden will look Just as good as everybody else’s…

Now when the day goes to sleep
And the full moon looks
The night is so black that the darkness cooks
Don’t you come creeping around
Making me do things I don’t wanna do… Green Manalishi – Fleetwood Mac (Green)