This is my first annual gardening column even though I have a perennial garden. Hah! That is a gardening joke. Keep your eyes peeled and see if you can spot them.

I’d never buy a condominium. You don’t have your little patch of earth, your personal pasture, although some people go condo for this very reason, to step away from yearly botanical failure. Gardens are like children in the sense that parenting never ends; you will fret over their welfare to the end of your days. But hope pops up like my tulips, annual, lickably green and, ultimately, without flowers on top. See, you have to lift bulbs, bed them under burlap and overwinter them in the shed. Yeah, like I am going to do that for a tulip.

As I was saying, hope. After my doctor told me I was Vitamin D-deficient — I bet that means rickets, I thought gloomily — following a winter spent indoors on the couch developing my verdigris, I got up and went outside.

Gardening, that’s the ticket!

It was April and my garden felt wonderfully incipient. I felt incipient in solidarity, a fallacy that was pathetic. I saw a snowdrop, the hatefully chirpy Disney character of the bulb world, and my brain bubbled serotonin.

I was eager to start work.

There’s digging, planting, training, clipping, fertilizing, watering, painting, repairing, shoring up, amending, mulching, thinning, picking up with a shovel and carrying delicately away, edging, raking, grafting, weeding, hoeing, top-dressing, deadheading, shifting, scraping, scrubbing, hauling, bickering, replacing, spending, weeping, more spending.

And then something breaks inside you. You throw away your mulch fork and spend the rest of the summer in a Muskoka chair, scratching at your mosquito bites till they go septic. You have no interest in this, this thing, this fenced green experiment. It’s not an Eden; it’s a rod for your back. Everything goes raggy and yellow in August and then winter comes.

Then you do it all again next year.

From bunnies to chocolate

Gardening has an element of rage. This morning I read the news about the German bunny murders. Satanists in the Ruhr are using Google Earth to track down homeowners’ rabbit hutches, the contents of which they behead and drain of blood. Forty rabbits have died so far. I have lived this hideous story; my childhood bunny, bitten and left paraplegic by dogs, was mercy-shot by my father. Still, if only they’d do it to squirrels.

A gardener learns to absorb scorched earth. I think the pale green lawn that we paid Nutri-Lawn a grand to make dark brown and tufty is funny. It sets our house apart, shall we say. Never mind, all lawns are annual (hint: another gardening joke).

The arborist also said that my neighbour’s willow had reached the end of its life cycle (she meant dead), the crabapple might survive a season with palliative care and the laburnum had basal canker, which means bark slicing off like veal. “Not viable” was how she put it. “Honey, we have weak trees,” as Tom Hanks told his wife in The Money Pit, a movie about a marriage-ending home renovation.

True, only a third of the morning glory seeds came up, but that’s twice as many as I need to coat the side of the porch. The experts were wrong: goutweed is not invasive but strawberry plants are. Ten years later, I am still plucking three-pronged little nasties out of the grass. Yes, the heucherella is scary, the colour of watery blood, but there’s a lot of it, which is all you can ask when you have sandy soil. We have major cotoneaster dieback, but that’s what happens when you prune the unprunable.

Actually, what happens is that you go to Sheridan Nurseries and spend freely, trusting in your capacity to earn more, as I tell myself. Much as I admire people who grow annuals from seed and grow prosperous gardens from friends’ clippings taken home wrapped in wet paper towel, I am no purist. I ask the staff what will grow in a sunless corner, they tell me chocolate vine, and we will see.

Garden thrills

The great gardener Monty Don said he once dreamed that his fingers grew down into the soil he had worked that day. “I woke very happy. To this day I get the same sense of well-being from working my hands into loose soil that some people get from smelling the sea or hearing the buzz of a football crowd.”

This sounds like Amélie going to the market and sticking her hands deep into bins of lentils. A bit weird, but that’s sensation for you. The artemisia feel like feathers under my hand, the fish fertilizer on the petunias smells aggressively fertile, little girls skipping home from day care are flattered senseless when you give them a fragrant viburnum blossom to take home and the campanula carpatica are a purple lake pouring down the stone wall.I am not a nature lover. Nature is very nice in its place, and I wish other people to preserve it, camp in it, venture into its depths and die alone, and eat its roots and berries. I’m thinking of buying a tent at Mountain Equipment Co-op and sleeping out back one night this summer. This is my idea of Extreme Nature, making my garden and lying in it. Until 2 a.m., when I will clump inside for a civilizing sedative because the raccoons are keeping me awake and I’m itchy/cold/hot/worried that Colbert isn’t PVRing and then I’ll venture out again into the dark; what thrills.

This Week

Dazed as I am in the mornings, I was heading off to work when I decided to do a quick bit of pruning on the Virginia creeper that covers the house. I sliced open the little finger of my left hand, the same fingertip my husband once sliced off his own hand while pruning our euonymus alata with the same brand of secateurs I was using. There had been pain and horror, plus I had learned that you cannot get bloodstains out of pressure-treated wood; the garden gate still looks like an exhibit from the Manson Family trial.

I had just been reading David Sedaris’ story Old Faithful, in his new essay collection, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. He develops a huge painful boil on his tailbone that his boyfriend obligingly lances, to their mutual horror. It brought back those months when my husband and I would cease whatever political or child-rearing dispute we were having and I would in silence dress his finger stump. It required concentration, expensive sterilizing solutions, two kinds of rare bandages and a lot of time. Like Sedaris and his Sir Lance-a-lot, it was a twisted yet eloquent definition of long-term monogamous love. Reader, it was romantic.