In the picture life of Mother, Father, Peter and Jane and Pat the dog, Father was always wearing green wellies, carrying pruning shears in his hand, and trampling very neat soil patches in the garden. Subconsciously, I always thought: “Ah, that is something to do when you’re Old.”
It seems now is the time when I have become Old. On June 4, I became a gardener. Nothing like the Ladybird book Father of course, he was a pro – his manicured garden never had a single overgrown weed. No, you could say I am a (very, very) bumbling gardener.
To put you in the picture, before June 4, we did not really have a garden. You could say we had a micro-jungle or a mini primeval forest or a green wild west. Each time the dog – Jipsie, not Pat – went out to relieve herself, she’d emerge happy but camouflaged in green-and-brown weedy tangles. Then J, the (very, very) Professional Gardener came along, took matters in hand Tarzan-like, and finally we could see beyond the fog of green.
“Oh look we have some trees!”, “Oh look we have soil!”, “Oh look we have a garden wall!” we exclaimed in manner of Mother and Father for a whole day. “Oh look, what’s that … oh erm...” For finally, we could also see Jipsie’s little mementos.
And then, suddenly – and partially thanks to Joseph Muscat – I fell in love with gardening.
I planted some flowers and some herbs in a small patch on the sunny side of the garden, and what do you know? They lived and they grew and even turned into bushes. The poor olive tree which had looked like on its last leg of life suddenly perked up and it has even produced 27 olives. With each new olive, and with each flower that pokes it neck above the soil, I screech with joy and boss all the family to “Come and see this!”
Gardens are today soilless, treeless: just a largely tiled yard, edged with tal-franka walls and blue-tiled blobs in the middle
Gradually, pottering in the garden and mulching the soil became my antidote to any upsetting news. I go out in the garden and work the soil until I couldn’t find a sliver of weed root, and then proceed to unpluck those amorous black slugs with shells who have plans of world domination judging by their reproductive rate.
The sage, parsley, basil, mint and rosemary, even changed the way we cook – we’re always on the lookout for recipes which give us the excuse to go in the garden and cut the herbs. I am finding myself buying books and having conversations about vegetables and herbs and finding out things such as the fact that rosemary in Maltese is klin and that Iklin is called after the herb because it was built on a site where rosemary grew wildly and abundantly.
Everywhere I go, I take note of people’s potted plants and soil patches. Sadly most home greenery is being stamped out to make way for pools. Gardens are today soilless, treeless: just a largely tiled yard, edged with tal-franka walls and blue-tiled blobs in the middle. Apartments are built without the allowance of a communal green space. I worry that we are facing tiles and concrete walls all the time.
However, some houses and some apartments have little backyard or rooftop or even balcony patches with lovely green stories. One house organised a system of recycling compost heap, another one tended a centuries-old fig tree as the pride of place of the house; another one was growing watermelon in pots (I want to grow my own!); another one had a little rooftop corner with cherry tomatoes and aubergines. It’s so fascinating – and rewarding – watching seeds grow, and finally I can empathise with Prince Charles for talking to plants
Three months on, I can definitely say that gardening is the best antidote to lift your spirits up. But do you know what’s even better? That an afternoon of pottering in the garden, weeding and raking, is the equivalent of a sweaty workout. It’s just like jogging on a treadmill. How so, you may tut-tut? Apparently a Pennsylvanian university study concluded that prolonged light exercise, such as gardening, can burn more calories than a gym session, although feeling much easier to do. I am sharing this because it looks like next time you bump into me I’m going to have one of those upside down triangular athlete’s body.
Plus of course, there is the added bonus that when gardening, you are not just staring at the flashing monitor of the treadmill and smelling the acidic sweat of the guy running the machine next to you, but you’re breathing in the soul-enriching smell of wet earth.
There’s more! Perhaps the most unexpected potential benefit of getting our hands dirty comes from researchers at the University of Bristol who report that bacteria commonly found living in soil may have a positive effect on our mood. They concluded their report by saying that maybe, after all, “we should all spend more time playing in the dirt”.
Yeah, maybe we should and maybe we shouldn’t wait until we’re Old.
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