In my garden the firethorn towers above its advertised maximum height, covers itself in white blossom and then red berries in due season, and thrusts spiny branches out to obstruct the croquet patch. The buddleia grows seven or eight feet in a year, pushing out purple cones of flowers. The berberis has purple leaves on the outside, green on the inside, and needle spines that penetrate leather gardening gloves if grasped too hard. When it rains, the weight of water on the leaves makes it loom forward over the lawn like Dracula, cloak spread to engulf a screaming beauty. The magnolia has exploded since the neighbours felled their eucalyptus. Gorgeous large flowers erupt for a time and shed masses of petals which rot in an attempt to smother the grass beneath.
The bay tree provides more bay leaves than my spaghetti Bolognese can ever use, and it uses them to outgrow the neighbour’s fir trees and become a danger to the house. There are two apple trees. The Cox grows, and grows, though hardly ever produces an apple. The Worcester Pearmain stays small, but sprouts apples at every conceivable vertex. The plum, on a pixie rootstock to restrict its growth, defiantly pushes branches up and out in all directions. Most years it doesn’t bother with plums, but every so often they are packed so densely that the branches bow to the ground and break. The pear tree grew for many years before deigning to produce a pear, but now does so regularly, the pears going straight from rock-hard to rotten, passing through edible in an instant. Against the side of the house, catching the morning sun, is a thornless blackberry which every year grows half a dozen shoots to a length of ten feet or more. It has driven out the other berries planted alongside it and now rules the wall.
The lawn is green, even in the driest years, thanks to the liberal sprinkling of buttercup, daisy, dandelion and clover. In the wet, it becomes soggy and impassable to mowers and turns into a hay meadow with white, yellow and purple flowers, and tall grass stalks topped with seed heads waving in the breeze.
The tools I use most have cutting edges. The spinning blade on the mower chops even long grass and handshears deal with the lawn edges. Secateurs enable precision pruning and a handsaw with vicious teeth cuts through thicker live wood. Long handled shears reach into the thorny plants. The long lopper, a ten foot aluminium pole with a blade on one end connected to a lever on the other, reaches the top of most trees, except for the rampant non-productive apple. An electric hedge cutter commits primitive topiary on the berberis and leaves the lawn studded with sharp points.
Gardening is a never-ending battle against the propensity of green things to grow too much. Gardening is trimming, pruning back, slicing off, cutting down.
So what is it about the damned runner beans? I plant a row from seed when the soil has warmed, water them in, stick in some canes. Each time I think about watering them some more, it is raining. Tiny green shoots appear – weeds. I realise that perhaps I should have planted more bean seeds, redundantly, so I pop some into a plastic tub of soil and put it in a propagator in the conservatory, which warms it to accelerate growth. A bean shoot appears, from the original batch in the garden, with two leaves, which last a couple of days before being chewed off. Another shoot appears which wafts around until it finds a cane to wind round, not the nearest, but any one will do. Holes appear in its leaves. A third bean plant appears, hiding in a batch of weeds to protect itself. Of the other half dozen there is no sign. In the propagator, nothing comes for days, weeks, then a couple of weeds poke through. It’s warm, damp soil, for christ’s sake! What more can those beans want?
Plants have their own agenda and grow to keep people off-balance and anxious. I look out through the dining room window at the garden where the long grass merges with the drooping shrubs and bushes, sealing off the gaps and exits and closing in on me.
