The Garden State

2011-09-13 13:30

It was around two in the afternoon on a hellishly hot Grahamstown day, sometime in 2000. It was so hot my eyeballs had evaporated and two of my three digsmates had dehydrated rather alarmingly into crumbling husks, the kind you see only after the Nazis have ignored Indiana and gone and opened the Ark of the Covenant anyway.

So there I was, minding my own business, slowly boiling from the inside out in my steamy living room. And in walked the fourth digsmate with her overly chipper parents (we had just moved into our digs, so there was much parental traffic at the start of the year. Except for my folks, who still thought I was in standard nine somewhere in Cape Town).

Perky and Pompous, as I liked to call my friend’s gratingly officious folks (one was an art gallery owner, the other a former “struggle” journalist. If you think you know insufferable, then wait. Wait until you meet a white “struggle” journo. Then you’ll know all about it), anyhow, Perky and Pompous stroll in like the King and Queen of Umhlanga, take one look at the, admittedly, shabby, state of affairs inside and outside the house and decide it’s time to do some gardening, particularly on the lawn around the garden flat their beloved was moving into - with my help.

You would think that two such cerebral minds would think better than to ask a hungover, inconveniently attired (for some reason I was wearing my favourite Garfield boxer shorts. And a cowboy hat), barely breathing student to tend to the matter of trimming their daughter’s bush.

Slowly, and somewhat begrudgingly, I acquiesced, as by now my two chums were sentient piles of ash that stirred only when it looked like I was heading towards the fridge.

Time to trim

Whacking away at the shrubbery in a far more sober outfit (Garfield shorts, cowboy hat. And sneakers!) I decided there and then that gardening was not the future vocation for me, and started to wonder whether I could change my BA for something more practical, like nuclear physics, to ensure that I would never have to weed between the cracks again.

Of course, 11 years later, I go and find myself a girlfriend who’s just bought a house with a small patch of grass and overgrown flowerbeds inhabited, by the looks of it, with something that crawled out of the Amazon in 76BC and decided to take a nap, undisturbed for several thousand years, in a patch of sand in Mowbray.

Naturally, this fine young lass is a busy engineer saving people’s lives and such with various engineering-type devices, and so doesn’t really have time to trim her wildly blossoming patch of lawn. And it gets left to the gullible boyfriend, now at least in Jockey boxer shorts, felt fedora and gardening Crocs (still no pants and shirt, though) to fire up the weed-eater.

Well, all I can tell you, after nine blissful years of living in a flat with nothing more to nurture than a robust fungus on the bathroom ceiling, my aptitude for gardening has not grown at the same rate as Robyn’s outrageously verdant back garden.

For two months, through a decidedly moist Cape Town winter, she ignored the lawn, imploring me to do something about it as the grass started to interrupt our view of the clouds and the neighbours complained that nine out 10 cats that jumped over her fence never returned.

I bit the bullet, revved up the mower, and attacked the lawn with the kind of zeal usually associated with cheeky colonialists helping themselves to diamond mines. I was astonished; I found the Lost City of Atlantis, I noticed for the first time that there was a garden shed in the garden, and happened across the skeletons of nine cats and an enormously rotund tabby cat lolling around in the shade of my Amazonian People-Eating Ficus.

It was mildly rewarding (well, it will be when I’m acknowledged as a revolutionary discoverer of lost cities). But I still hate gardening.


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