My overgrown garden feels like Apocalypse Now

YOU always hear about gardens being places of sanctuary.

Places of peaceful retreat, where you can tweak your petunias, snip at your hydrangeas, coo over your camellias. The garden is about slowness, introspection, a waking meditation as you kneel, communing with the earth, coaxing nature to life with your magical green fingers.

At least that’s the theory. If, however, you have not had the time — or, let’s be honest, the remotest inclination — to kneel in a flower bed patting and trowelling and weeding and watering, chances are that nature will have gone self-employed. You know the bit in Sleeping Beauty when the castle is hidden behind a hundred-year-old hedge of savage brambles that repels all comers? That’s like my house.

For numerous summers I have been studiously ignoring the garden, allowing it to grow into what I have been fancifully thinking of as a nature reserve. Which indeed it is, all waist high wild grasses, colourful weeds growing skyward like beanstalks, and a hedge the height and depth of a row of double decker buses. Small children who have gone to the aid of friends lost in the front garden wilderness have had to be rescued by heat-seeking equipment. Footballs are kicked and never seen again. Dogs disappear.

Finally, when the double decker hedge starts actually blocking out the light indoors, and guests are saying stuff like, “How abandoned — er, abundant”, I wonder if it isn’t time to take action.

Obviously, it’s a bit late for gardening. Not even a team of television gardeners could sort this situation out. No, this is not about gardening, with pathetic secateurs and truggs and pastel coloured gardening gloves. This is war.

I go to war on my garden via power tools. Forget the lame-ass hedge trimmer gathering cobwebs in the shed. I buy a chainsaw, fill it with two-stroke, and stick on my lodger’s welding goggles. RAAAAARRRRRRRR! Twenty-foot high bits of hedge fall on my head. My bra fills up with woodchip, and my hair gathers twigs. My kids retreat in embarrassment.

It’s so therapeutic that I rush out and get a petrol-powered strimmer with metal blades that could slice through Amazonian rainforest. Strapping it on, bondage-style, I slash through the garden jungle in great sweeping scythes. “Be careful,” suggests the lodger from the safety of his bedroom window. I ignore him. I’m lost in an Apocalypse Now meets The Predator moment.

Very soon the garden is decimated, and everyone is hassling me for a go of the chainsaw. By lunchtime, the place looks like it’s been to the barber for a skinhead number one — there is slashed greenery everywhere. Now that’s what I call gardening.