ladyofastolat | Exit pursued by a woodlouse

My Mum loves gardening. My Mum is never happier than when gardening. Presumebly she always hoped that I would inherit her interest. However, when I was a baby, my Mum also tried to get me interested in dogs, only to find that I was apparently incapable of even noticing the existence of dogs, but could spot even the tiniest cat at five hundred paces in the dark with my eyes shut, which probably didn't tend to augur well for my willingness to be swept up in parental enthusiasms.

I'm afraid that our approach to gardening has generally been to buy shrubs, plant them, and then declare a non-interference policy as they battle it out. Unfortunately, this was compounded by the fact that we have an awkward corner plot, with odd little patches of garden stuck in strange out-of-the-way places. We got some chaps in to turn one little piece into a patio. "Put some plants in around the edge," we said. When they'd finished, they proudly announced that they'd put it twice the number of plants they'd agreed, since there was a two-for-one deal at the garden centre. When my Mum came to visit a few months later, she stared in horror for a while, before telling us that each one of these plants needed about 12 feet of space to live in. The Tiggerish workmen had given each one about 12 inches.

Screams issued from that patio for a few years, as nature unleashed itself, ~~red in tooth and claw~~ green in root and sepal. On bright summer mornings, even the birds avoided the terror of that war. Great was the bloodshed, but at last only a few, a bold, mighty few, remained standing, striding over the corpses of the weaker. But then one of the victors, a passion flower, over-reached itself, and tried to take on the house itself, and successfully managed to eat the barbecue before Pellinor and my Mum armed themselves in Pellinor's chainmail and successfully vanquished it. That story is not yet over, for one of the plants the cheerful workmen planted in another fiddly little corner of the garden, a buddleia, is currently trying to claw its way in through the shower room window when nights are dark and winds are high...

However, all that is but to set the scene. Today, finding myself with a day off, and having watched Torchwood, read a book and hung up the washing, I decided that a brief peace-keeping visit was required into the uneasy equilibrum that is the post-war back gaden. Yes, I thought, I will do some weeding.

To soften the ground, I pulled out the hosepipe and watered the parched yellow grass, the invisible stony ground that exists somewhere beneath the victorious shrubs and the skeletons of their enemies, and a cat that had disguised itself as a fuschia. I then proceeded to the garden shed to get out a fork and a trowel and such like, but a spider had built its dream home over the shed door, and I didn't have the heart to destroy it and break its heart. Reduced to using bare hands and kitchen utensils, I attacked some things whose roots went down to Australia, apologised profusely when I ruined a woodlouse metropolis that had probably been about to invent the wheel beneath the bindweed, spared a few more spider houses, reprieved some scarlet pimpernel on the grounds that it was pretty, then tangled with a suicidal blackbird that apparently thinks that perching on the grass two feet away from a disgruntled and soggy cat is a good idea.

After ten minutes, I beat a retreat. The garden is a war-zone that is probably best avoided.