From The Curious Gardener
By Anna Pavord
It is a wonderful relief to leaf through gardening magazines and realize that there are so many thing that I don’t want. No, it’s stronger than that. There are things that, even if they arrived for free, would still be put straight in the boot of the car and driven to the nearest Oxfam shop. Gadgets and me don’t have a long history. I expect them to go wrong and, obligingly, they do.
Multi-task tools seem to me the worst. Does it really make life easier to have one stick and three interchangeable heads, each of which do different things? I don’t think so. I don’t want to scrabble round with levers and locks, fiddle with clip-on-clip-off devices to build my own rack from what had previously been a hoe.
The tools you need in a garden are so few, so well defined, you can understand why manufacturers get frustrated. It doesn’t give them much opportunity to expand their markets. The basic kit is the same one that John Evelyn described in the seventeenth century: spade, fork, trowel, line, hoe, rake, something to cut with. For him it would be a beautifully made pruning knife. For us it’s a pair of secateurs. Now that was a breakthrough.
Do I want a gas-driven weed wizard, with a butane gas cylinder fastened to a long handle? Fire up the flame! burn off the weed! No, I don’t! Not because I have sympathy for the weed but because the method speaks of industrial estates, ugliness, harsh environments, techniques from a factory world that would have nothing to do with world I am trying to pull together round me in my garden.
Garden vacs? No, NO! ‘Take the effort out of tidying up, just zip around with the latest of garden gadgets,’ trilled an advertisement I recently read. Why turn gardening into housework? Vacuuming the carpets is a sad necessity, given the number of feet that tramp about our place, but the stuff that lies about outside is not displaced dirt. It is meant to be there. It is potential humus, the lifeblood of your soil.
The vac is noisy too, but perhaps could be forgiven if the contents were tipped onto a compost heap…But it seems they are mostly not. They are bundled up and driven to the tip; two lots of energy needlessly consumed. And think of the poor beetles, the ladybirds and other insects sucked into that undiscriminating maw.
Legs broken, wing cases smashed, they hurtle through the whirling maelstrom, their poor bodies shattered in the vacuumed debris that they so trustingly thought was home. The environment! We’ve never been surrounded by so many people who think that if they put a bottle in a bottle bank once in awhile, they’ve done their bit for the planet.
I feel myself getting cross. That wasn’t what I wanted. Lighthearted, I said to myself at the beginning of this piece. But having got the garden vac out of the way, I think i’ll be alright now…
Oh, how heady this all is! No butyl pond liners, no ‘how to’ garden videos, no to plastic compost bins, battery operated wheelbarrows, soil cables, polytunnels…You might think this has been a story of negatives, all nos, no yeses, but not for me. I’m so pleased to find all of these things that I don’t need, I’m going to order a case of champagne to celebrate. Champagne–now there’s a real necessity!
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