Green Fingers

After selling our Airbnb, Anna, my wife, was worried about having nothing to do with her time and becoming bored. I suggested the novel idea of getting a job, at which she laughed. I said a couple of days at the local abattoir would get her out of the house, enable her to practise her French, meet new friends as well as bringing in a few pennies, and maybe some offcuts. But she wasn't interested.

What about gardening? The great outdoors, exercise, good for your mental health (as Monty Don keeps banging on about), etc. I love gardening and have always wanted to get Anna interested. To feel the earth between your fingers, to taste your own home-grown produce and to smell your home-made nettle liquid manure, maturing in the shed. But she says it's not her 'thing'. She loves being outside, appreciating the garden, but from her sun-lounger with a pina colada to hand. 

We would be like Jean de Florette and his good lady wife, Mrs Florette (the opera singer), I told her. Tilling the earth together and tending our vegetables and l'authentiques. She could sing the Stella Artois theme tune from our bedroom window and I could accompany her on my harmonica.

How to get Anna interested in gardening that's the question...use a bit of psychological manipulation?... a bit of the old Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence 'Hey missy, you want a go raking leaves, it's a hoot!'. She's a wiley old bird my wife and can see through me like a piece of cling film.

My dad, who is a keen gardener, tried to get me into gardening by giving me my own patch of soil when I was a child. Unfortunately, all the local cats in the areas used to do their business in it (the same thing happened to the sandpit he made). So the whole fun of rootling around in the ground lost its magic.

Slowly, slowly catchy monkey I thought. So last year I allocated the job of deadheading the geraniums to Anna, but instead of cutting them off at the bottom of their stalks, she just pulled the flowers off, leaving a very unattractive stalk-bush. It was too much responsibility too soon, or maybe she did it on purpose so I would drop the whole gardening crusade.

There are a couple of jobs in the garden she likes doing. 1) She likes mowing the lawn on the ride-on mower (so she is working whilst not getting out of a chair). 2) We have a grapevine along the back of our house from which she ferments her own wine. She is always tending it, picking off dead leaves or caressing the sweet berries, I'm pretty sure I've heard her talking to them when she thinks I'm not around.

This makes it sound as though my wife is a lazy alcoholic. Far from it, she is always on the go; a busy bee, busy, busy, busy. Cleaning, ironing, washing, meeting up with friends for coffee, going on walks to clock up her 10,000 paces daily, upholstering old chairs from Emmaus, brewing her wine, pestering the cat. But gardening is not in her genes.

Last year I asked myself why I bother gardening. The hours I spent toiling in the potager, just to produce a load of second rate vegetables. Even my tomatoes and courgettes, which are usually bankers, were pathetic. The only crop which grew in abundance was my parsley, which let's face it is one step up from growing cress in primary school on a piece of wet toilet paper.

I can't blame the soil or weather conditions either; as I drive to the supermarket to buy veg from our local Intermarché I pass the French plots brimming with produce like a harvest festival...tomatoes the size of babies' heads!

But I persevere, undaunted by my failings. 'There's no such thing as failure, just feedback' they say. Please!

I bought her some cut-flower seeds for Christmas (amongst other generous gifts) and told her I was going to 'donate one of my precious raised beds to her new hobby', in the hope that this might do the trick. When I saw the disappointment etched on her face on Christmas day, I knew I was flogging a dead horse...and you know what they say about dead horses...you can drag a dead hose to water, but you can't make them drink.