STRICTLY PERSONAL |

WHEN [ was a kid, garden-
ing held no thrill.

‘By the time my memories
begin, the war was almost over
and Victory Gardens were fading
from the scene, being replaced by
cut lawns.

If we happened to visit a
great-aunt or great-uncle, they
always seemed to have gardens
that filled up most of the back
yard. But my mother’s generation
seemed too busy,

, As the post-war housing boom
kicked in, rolled-up carpets of
pre-grown lawn, simply called
“*sod,’’ were unravelled across the
new yards around the new ran-
ch-style houses, and, bingo, in-
stant suburban heaven.

Fancy new cars appeared in

, driveways, and weekends were

| spent washing the car and water-

' ing the lawn,

But | hardly remember anyone,
except a few old folks (usually
from someplace in Europe) in the
neighborhood, having much of a
garden.

Then an aunt and uncle moved
in, and my aunt immediately went
to work planting your basic
vegetable garden. This is where 1
got introduced to gardening.

It was not a happy moment in
my boyhood.

Suddenly, | was having to help
dig fittle trenches and plant seeds
and set up strings to mark the
location of the seeds, and then
water everything, and almost as
soon as the plants broke through,
the weeds would spring forth, and
the rest of the summer would be
spent weeding.

L hated weeding! You had to
bend over. Your back would get
sore. It was almost as much of a
pain as kneeling in church.

I'd get bitten by mosquitoes and
black flies, and terrorized by
ground wasps,

It was hot and often dusty. The
nettles would sting, because I'd
get tired of wearing the cumber-
some, sweaty gardener's gloves,
and would take them off, and in-
evitably start getting stabbed. And
then the itchiness would drive me
crazy.

I'd much rather be down at the
old swimming hole, skinnydipp-
ing, Or playing cowboys and In-
dians in the bush across the street,
or, best of all, playing dirty with
the girl next door and sometimes
half a dozen other kids as well in
the neighbor's garage.

And then there was the day the
neighbor came driving home and
tried out his brand-new remote
electronic door-opening device,
which caught the whole gang of us
quite literally with our pants pull-
ed down, ... But I digress.

It was quite simple, Gardening
did not rank up there with my
major goals in life, especially
compared with playing next door,
or swimming in a mud-filled

an

ay

‘

tiver, or make-believe killing each
other,

1 definitely showed no sign of
having a green thumb.

Ok, fast forward ... to my late
20s. | had not touched a garden
hoe since I'd grown big enough to
get out and get a paper route, and
{ really had no intention of going
back to it, when, by accident,
ended up caretaking a wonderful
old roomiug house in Kitsilano, in
exchange for living in the
downstairs apartment looking out
over English Bay.

There was one catch, I’d have
to keep the garden going.

Weill, the garden turned out to
be an astonishing, enormous grray
of flowers, both inside and out-
side the yard, and over a huge
stone fence, only about half of
them perennials, and everything
needing watering.

Maybe it was the West Coast
air, with the occasional whiff
from Squamish, but this time,
rather than suffering as | tended
the garden, | found myself enjoy-
ing it.

The nice part about gardening,
I discovered,was that, while you
had to think about what you were
doing, it was a different kind of
thinking.

it wasn't verbal. It didn’t in-
volve stringing sentences together.
it was something you pictured,
more than put into words.

! would ‘‘see’’ the fertilizer baz
in the shed. | would notice that
too many seeds had sent up shoots
ina bunch, and would have to
figure out which ones to mer-
cilessly uproot.

Gardening, 1 realized, is like
playing God.

And, if you do it right,
everything looks magnificent for a
while.

And then it's gone. And then

SURE -SHOCK
st
uper
Chlorination

tinad
Sige

you start again.

How much more cosmic can
anything gev?

After a couple of years in my
flowery Kitsilano paradise, | mov-
ed with my wife and kids out to a
farm in Richmond, across a dike
road from the North Arnt of the
Fraser, in a house where the
Queen of Holland (or was it a
princess?) was reputed to have
stayed during the First World
War.

By this time [ had read Rachel
Carson’s Silent Spring and Vance
Packard's The Waste Makers, and
was paranoid about pesticides and
herbicides in the food | was buy-
ing at supermarkets, so | decided
we should grow our own food as
much as possible,

" Horseshoe Bay

This was back in the late '60s.
Except for a few interludes when |
was living on a floathouse and,
later, a boat, | have managed to
have a vegetable garden and
flowers growing in my various
yards ever since.

§ grow my gardens more
organically than my aunt used to.
Lam eclectic in my choice of
flowers and shrubs.

But the real difference between
now and then is that, bent over on
my knees, yanking sweatily at
unwanted weeds, | don't wish to
be anywhere else, or to be doing
anything other than exactly what
I'm doing.

Getting old, ! gucss

L AN
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