GAH DENING

I went to the garden centre with my mum this lunch time.

I am not a very competent gardener.  I am, at times, a rather enthusiastic gardener.  When I am in the mood for gardening I can just garden the shit out of things.  I am good at things like double digging and pruning, and strimming and mowing, and hefting about gigantic rocks.  I’m also exceptionally gifted at burning things down.

Like sheds.

I am not good at things like artfully planting tasteful flowers and shrubs and making a harmonious pact with nature.

Like Andrew Marvell, and Alan Titchmarsh.

I usually buy what I like, stick it all in a border and pray over it like crazy.  What happens next is down to nature and how many snails live in the immediate vicinity.  I’m not really the nurturing seedlings type.

I’d like to be.  I have blogged in the past about my totally unrealistic mental picture of myself as a kind of hybrid between Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, Monty Don and Kirsty Allsop, swinging my trug gaily through the undergrowth as I wait for my home made ginger beer to ferment, so that I can pour it into hand chiselled stone urns wot I have crafted by my own self.

It is all a huge crock of shit.

I just do not have the patience for it.  I am a demolisher, not a creator.

I do like garden centres though.  I’m not sure why.  I think the fact that most of them have a tea room nestled at the heart of them helps.  Also that they sometimes smell a bit like Wilkinson’s used to smell in the olden days when it was more of a DIY/gardening supplies shop, and less like a tat version of Ikea (which is saying something).

Our local garden centre used to be brilliant.  It was a good mix between actual gardening stuff that you would use in a real garden, and a shop that sold strange ornaments next to packets of seeds.  It also had a great tea room.

About four years ago it was taken over by one of those huge garden centre giants, Wyevale, I think.

Since then it has become steadily more and more rubbish.

Things went downhill when they started selling Bill Oddie branded bird food.  I’ve never trusted Bill’s outspoken love for his feathered friends ever since he started charging six quid a bag for specialist blue tit food.

What’s wrong with Blue Peter’s bits of bacon rind glued together with sunflower seeds eh Bill?

It probably doesn’t pay for a yacht in Marbella in which to spend your twilight years, that’s what.

Call me cynical.

I am.

Ever since then it has become less about gardening and more about turning it into a massive, out of town shopping centre which sells nothing you actually want, all at eye wateringly expensive prices.

Take today.

We went because mum had a voucher to buy a plant with.  From this particular garden centre.  Otherwise we would have gone elsewhere.

There were about two hundred plants on a site that covers several acres.  All of them looked like they had been chewed.  Most of them were half dead.

Instead of plants, the other 90 acres or so was covered with random stuff.

Stuff like:

Lakeland Plastics – where you can buy a fruit and vegetable mattress (I kid you not) to stop your fruit and veg getting bruised (this is not a euphemism), a tupperware ‘onion dome’ (no home is complete without one), and ninety thousand gingham jam pot covers.

Edinburgh Woollen Mill – Where you can buy nasty tartan car rugs and dreadful sweaters that make you look like a sausage tied up with string, none of which have ever been near Edinburgh or any kind of woollen mill.  They have however, undoubtedly been sweated over by two hundred Taiwanese twelve year olds being paid tuppence an hour in old money.

Some kind of shoe outlet whose name sounds like Chthulu, which can’t be right, because that’s some kind of winged, mythical beast. And he would never be seen dead in those kind of comfy sling backs.

A large furniture department which sells excruciating wicker furniture sets of the sort that leave inch long splinters in your buttocks, and have garish, flame retardant cushions that are ‘wipe down’ for £3000 per set.  These are the sort you see at local auctions going for £25 for the entire set including the glass topped coffee table.  You also often see them on top of bonfires, and at the local tip.

A deli which sells allegedly home made cakes. These are made by a woman called Pamela.  Pamela makes all her cakes, no matter what variety they are, look pallid and slightly anaemic, and worryingly squashed.  They look like the sort of cakes your twelve year old brings home from Home Economics class, which you claim to be ‘delicious’, but secretly feed to the birds when they are at school the next day.  Pamela’s cakes are £6.99 each.

A tea room in which the largely indifferent staff fling large quantities of frozen prawns in marie rose sauce all over the pats of butter, failing to see the giant, tepid jacket potato in front of them, and give you the plate only after they have stuck their thumb into the marie rose sauce.  They then charge you £10 for the privilege of being roundly ignored.

Today there was a new theme at the garden centre.  Someone had bought a job lot of stone owls. Apparently these stone owls have been individually hand carved and crafted, after each stone has been carefully picked from the bottom of a river bed somewhere in India.  This justifies the fact that the smallest owl starts at £8 and they go up to over £100 each.

There were so many owls it’s a wonder that river bed has any bed left.

There were truly thousands of these owls. They were arranged in worrying clumps all over the place, right from the entrance of the store, all the way to the tills.  You thought you had seen the last of them, until you turned a corner to find them gurning, in ever increasing numbers.  We wondered whether there had been a slip up on the order form and they had ordered 7000 instead of 7? Or whether more than one person had processed the order.

Apart from the fact that they were obviously stone owls, they looked worryingly familiar.  I couldn’t place them at all.  Then, just before we left I got it. They looked like the Tove Jansson illustration of the Hattifatteners, just at that bit of the story where they all get illuminated by the lightening strike on the island and start buzzing around the beach in droves.

A bit like this (this is from the t.v. series, not the book).

We were so alarmed we totally failed to buy a plant and had to come home for a cup of tea and a biscuit.