A gentle bank holiday in the garden almost sparks explosive headlines

WE lost custody of the garden a couple of years back.

Our neighbour a field away, Ms Lynders, took one look at us and decided we didn’t know our iris from our elbow. We were clearly not fit to be in charge of growing things. She didn’t get legal about it. She just started to arrive, kitted for combat in boots, patched jeans and – if it was lashing rain – a headscarf to protect the white curls.

No invasion of privacy was involved. Ms Lynders arrives like an ambulance or a fire brigade; announced by noise long before physical presence materialises. This woman moves in a cloud of Pomeranians. Pomeranians are the yappiest little dogs that ever lived. They spend their lives threatening total strangers with dire consequences. They don’t distinguish. They give out to the plumber’s van with as much conviction as they use when they give out to the plumber, which doesn’t make much sense, since the van doesn’t promise to kick them into Kingdom Come the way the plumber always does. (The plumber does robust relationship-building. The first time he met me, he told me I was “a f*****g disgrace” for leaving the immersion heater on all day. You can tell he specialises in customer care.)

Ms Lynders allows us visitation rights, and sometimes even gives us choices. She asks us if we’d prefer one plant with a Latin name over another, gesturing at a tray she’s brought with her, filled with what look like dead scallions in little pots but are in fact plants she has propagated. We tell her we haven’t a clue and trust her judgment.

She has a General Patton approach to gardening, always egging to exterminate some enemy plant that has developed notions. Last year it was a bush called Veronica. I’m not sure what this year’s enemy is. She’s usually cheerful about her battle plans, though. So when I found her, on Saturday, looking depressed, trowel in one hand, bag of compost in the other, it was a surprise.

“Ah, darlin’,” she said sadly, “I sprayed the weeds in the lawns with petrol.”

It didn’t seem wise to observe that the weeds in the lawns seemed to be thriving.

“And the drive, too. I sprayed it with petrol.”

The drive was pock-marked with dandelions. I’d been thinking of trying a dandelion salad on the man in my life, since any food that’s free, right now, has to be considered, even if he hated the nettle soup I tried on him a few months back. He said it looked dirty and tasted like slime.

“I thought it was Roundup,” Ms Lynders said.

“What’s Roundup?”

“Weedkiller.”

“Oh, petrol isn’t a weedkiller?”

That went down so badly, I thought I was going to lose the visitation rights. What had happened, it emerged, was that she had mixed up a can of petrol kept for vehicular emergencies with the weedkiller and spent two days spraying the garden with the wrong thing. Petrol is adored by the average weed, she explained.

It was at this point it registered that my neighbour had spent hours moving through the garden surrounded with a fine mist of petrol with a lit cigarette glued to her lower lip the whole time. Self-immolation had been a real and present danger throughout. Not to mention the explosive possibilities every time she refilled the sprayer. You wouldn’t think volunteer good neighbour gardening was likely to give rise to horror headlines, but we were one spark away from a story that would have taken the election off the front pages.

While she punished the weeds for her mistake by giving them a double dose of what they should have got first time around, and I abandoned any thoughts of dandelion salad, given that a mixture of petrol and Roundup was not likely to make it appetising, the Pomeranians started to yell abuse at a political candidate whose strong selling point was that she was the only one standing in the local elections who canvassed “out this far”. Which had the unintended effect of sounding as if she was so desperate for votes she was prepared to venture into the hinterland where the wrists of the loin cloth-wearing natives dragged on the ground. It didn’t seem a good idea to introduce her to the plumber, who arrived at the same time and drove the Pomeranians into a complete frenzy.

The plumber was responding to a call from me to find out why – in the middle of a drought – I had two eerie recurring puddles in one part of the garden. These puddles mysteriously appeared, then disappeared, then came back again. They had bubbles on the top and, for a while, I thought maybe we’d developed an Icelandic geyser, since we’ve followed Iceland in so many trends recently. But no. The plumber worked out that whoever had originally plumbed the kitchen sink outlet, once he’d got the dishwashing liquid out of the building, hadn’t much cared where it went, thereafter.

As the plumber left, swearing impartially at politicians, negligent plumbers and Pomeranians alike, two friends arrived to show off their new golden retriever puppy. The two felines, who regard Ms Lynders’ red-haired bundles of aggression with no more than distant contempt, took one look at this mountain of gentle affability and became cartoon cats.

THEY went into rigid hoops of defence, their every hair standing up like they were Fuller brushes, while they hissed and spat. The puppy thought they were only mighty to be able to put on such an entertaining performance, and lolloped over to applaud them personally. As his owner tried to restrain him, (for the dog’s own protection) I grabbed the two cats to release them in the open (they were indoors because of the weedkiller). At precisely the moment I passed the golden retriever, both of them dug their claws into my forearms and yanked with such force, my skin tented around each claw and spurted blood all over me and them. It didn’t show so much on the black one, but Scruffy, normally as white as an Alp, took off into the hills looking like he’d been too close to a drive-by shooting.

The dog then ate my expenses receipts, one of my pair of Miu Miu shoes and the flex off the computer. He also showed me such affection that by the time he left, I was soggy from saliva. He particularly liked the taste of the Dettol I put on my wounds. Every time I renewed it, he saw it as second helpings.

After he’d gone, during the night, the two cats, obviously feeling they needed to reinforce their position in the house, brought us gifts. The smallest mouse in history and the biggest pigeon. Both deposited on the kitchen floor. The mouse pathetically intact, the pigeon in three neat portions: head, body and kidney. (Scruffy could get a job as a pathologist tomorrow, he excises the organs of the dead with such precision.)

And that was just Saturday. Remind me, someone. Who was it invented these stressful things called bank holiday weekends?