Andrew Oldham writes about Pig Row, which is three gardens over a quarter of an acre in Scouthead. Visit at www.lifeonpigrow.co.uk
TELEVISION GARDENERS could learn from the thrifty gardener, those new to gardening andallotment holders.
There has been a move over the years for celebrity gardeners to construct expensive glasshouses; all brick work that owe more to the cathedral than somewhere to grow food, and, who have jumped on assorted gardening fads from grow your own to rockeries that go out of fashion before you’ve paid your next television license.
The cast offs from these fads can be useful to the thrifty, the make do and mend grower. Anyoneremember the decking craze? Much of that wood has since been ripped up after many gardeners and their families found themselves doing too many unwanted splits in the journey from the kitchen to their barbeque.
That decking normally ended up in a skips and then landfill. Then a growing brigade of make do and mend gardeners stepped in. Skip diving became a pass time and self-sufficiency stopped being a dirty word.
That discarded decking became raised beds, a gate or two, a window box, staging in a greenhouse constructed of abandoned windows or, in the case of Pig Row, storm shutters to protect the shed windows during winter.
The make do and mend gardener should be celebrated on our television screen; they should be our ‘celebrity’ gardeners.
We should applaud the kind of gardener who goes grey if you actually throw something away. We need the kind of gardener that looks at a car tyre and thinks ‘planter’. We need more Bobs, Johns and Alys’s.
We need more people like you, who make do and mend rather than those who build cathedrals in their gardens that will get blown down in the first high wind.
We don’t need aspiration. We need gardeners. We need to be a community of growers.
