There should be a word for a person who loves to have a pretty garden but has zero love for gardening.
Lazy may be one but in this era of self-love, I’m not prepared to use it.
I realised long ago that crouching over a flower bed in the hot sun to pluck out weeds or pruning strelitzias that I was convinced harboured spiders was not for me.
And so I limited myself to container gardening. Surely even I could keep things watered and alive for a season or two before heading off to the nursery for more seedlings.
I do love a good nursery. Rows of blooming flowers rustling with health, sparkling fountains, sweet seedlings brimming with promise and herbs begging for a home in return for flavourful, aromatic food.
It’s all very hard to resist until you get home with a soil-scattered boot and a whole lot of sweaty work ahead and the familiar realisation that, much like artfully arranged home lifestyle stores, nursery perfection is just a fantasy.
I have accepted that I will never wake up and be one of those people who obtain therapy from sinking their hands in the soil or achieve a Zen state from dividing perennials, though I have huge admiration for those who do.
But if I venture too far away from potting petunias in summer and pansies in winter, things start to furl up and die.
I kept a potted rose plant alive and flowering for two or three years and a floribunda for a little longer than that, but they gave up the ghost despite the special rose food I dispensed as per instruction.
I once bought a gorgeous camellia with romantic pink blooms in East London which dug in its roots and refused to flower for years after.
It survived a move to Cape Town, but the most it would do was produce hopeful buds which tuned brown before dejectedly letting go of their branches.
It took six years before one of the buds unfurled into pretty pinkness and my gratitude was embarrassing. I even posted the bloom on social media.
I wish I had inherited my mother’s green finger genes. Though she never owned much of a garden, she would keep her balcony and indoor plants alive and kicking for decades.
When I left Cape Town for the Eastern Cape in the early 1990s she took over my gasping indoor plants and gave them new life.
A couple of them were so happy in her care that they took off and became indoor trees.
Unable to grow higher than ceiling height they curled over and hung like willow trees lovingly overlooking the armchair in which she sat.
She could take a fern with one surviving frond and transform it into a luscious plant worthy of the Amazon.
She could take a wilted peace lily and with yellowed leaves that hadn’t bloomed in years and cajole it back into shape and trumpeting flowers.
She could keep and propagate African violets to gorgeous showings of pink and purple blooms for many, many years.
They were her pride and joy and lined every windowsill and flat surface in her apartment.
She loved them and they loved her back. I’m sure of it.
When her mobility made it hard for her to keep her troop of balcony plants watered, every visitor who popped in for tea would have a watering can pressed into their hands to do the honours.
Under her watchful eye, we would dispense water to the ragtag collection of succulents and cacti amassed over her lifetime, many grown to Jurassic proportions and bursting from their containers.
They wanted to please her, so they grew babies which her arthritic hands were unable to rehouse.
When she died, most of them came to live with me. How could I leave them?
So now my patio heaves with pots and spindly old wrought iron plant pot holders that teeter in the south-easter and must be tethered for survival.
My gardening may be reluctant in nature, but it’s never a bother to sprinkle water on mom’s old succulents.
I hear her voice and feel her love when I do it.
I have even managed to keep the remainders of her vintage African violets alive and flowering, but I think they are still going because they are forever fuelled by the years of love she bestowed on them. I just add water.
Last weekend, my husband, whose mobility is temporarily impaired due to a snapped Achilles tendon and a leg cast, decided that despite having to access our garden via a flight of steps navigated on his bottom, he would refresh his herb and vegetable planters.
After a visit to a fabulously well-stocked nursery which lent him a wheelchair, punnets of spring onions, green peppers and basil seedlings had now to be sunk into soil.
It meant I had to sacrifice a few hot hours carting watering cans, hauling (and spilling and stepping into) smelly compost and carrying plastic chairs up and down stairs for him and his recovering leg to sit on while planting.
I found it impossible to arrange my face into a genial expression and may even have been quite unpleasant.
I would much rather have been watching gardening programmes on TV.
And, now that the seedlings are in, an extra chore is added to the daily list.
Watering cans must be filled at the water tank and tipped over the little green shoots.
Maybe we will bond and I will rush out to pluck snails away from them and shield them from the summer winds with my body.
I do hope that happens. Perhaps I will shed my reluctance and become a maniacal mulcher and a dynamic dead-header.
I’ve heard of people shedding their gardening reluctance and replacing it with zeal …
In the meantime, I’ll garden with a grudge. And hope the plants don’t hold it against me.
