If only I could have a garden make-over

2:33pm Friday 1st August 2008

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A LOT of my professional life involves touring with assorted theatrical productions. On my wanderings around the country my constant driving companions tend to be Radios 4 and 5; the latter for the sport and the former because it provides a great mixture of information and entertainment.

For instance, I am to gardening what theatre critics are to plays - I know what I like but can't do it myself.

But a programme I love is Gardeners' Question Time. I love listening to experts talking about their passions.

But, alas, I cannot translate it into anything that has any useful impact on my life whatsoever.

Every year I survey the chaotic profusion of what my wife and I choose to refer to as our garden, despite the lack of any evidence that a human being has spent many minutes tending it and despite the depredations caused by our assorted domestic pets and the abundant local wildlife that use it as restaurant, larder, playground and public convenience.

I suppose that if gardening produces a garden, what we have could only be reasonably described as a mow'.

For that is the only activity that takes place within the boundaries of our random mixture of hedges, which sport elder, holly, beech, bracken, nettles and hawthorn every few yards.

I sit on my bright red Countax and briefly experience the (completely spurious) feeling that this somehow makes me at one with the countryside.

After my passage across what it would be decidedly presumptuous to call a lawn, it is at least easier to spot where our deaf and obsessively greedy Dalmatian has seen fit to strew the evidence of her eternal quest for anything to consume, the more rotting and malodorous the better.

But at the same time does it really look better, post-mow, than it did when it was a carpet of dandelions and daisies?

I would love to stroll in my own proper garden - but lack the will, the skill and the ability to do the requisite work.

Indeed, my osteopath would be rubbing his hands with glee (or let's be charitable and say wringing them in despair) were I suddenly to take up gardening.

If only one of those lifestyle programmes would give me a garden makeover. You know the ones; they send you off to a health farm for the day while Capability' Brown, Visionary' Green and Generosity' Gold create a horticultural paradise?