If you don’t listen carefully, your garden could turn out like this!

I am the first to admit that gardening is not my cup of tea and I would not make a gardener’s armpit. I have a black thumb, am tone deaf and have two left feet for dancing (but that’s another story). As far as gardening is concerned, I have great difficulty telling the difference between a rose, a carnation, a daffodil and a daisy. I know they’re all flowers, have pretty colours and a pleasant smell but that’s all to me. Seeing a plant with colour instantly tells me that it is a flower of some sort and must be retained. Maybe! Imagine how much harder it is for me to tell the difference between wanted and unwanted things when they are all green. One green thing looks the same as any other green thing to me.

Weeding is a greater dilemma as some have pretty flowers. My ex-wife hated me weeding because I tend to pull things out then say, “Is this a weed?”. That usually gets a good reaction – like a lump of dirt between the eyes. It’s even worse when I pull out something that was meant to stay. I then frantically dig a small hole and bury, sorry, plant, the thing again. “Other way up, you idiot”, she encouragingly says.

Using politically correct terminology, I am horticulturally challenged. Some people, especially my ex-wife, say I am just a challenge. Others, and again my ex-wife is on the top of the list, say I am just challenged as far as gardening goes. I am a mobile disaster area in the garden.

After much coaching and encouraging threats, the time arrived when my ex-wife sent me out unsupervised, to do odd jobs around the garden. The brief was to make it look sort of lived-in rather than a deserted jungle. Free at last. I’ll show her I can now garden just as well as any other inept person. I suppose the writing was on the wall but I was like a kid who was able to go to the shop by themselves for the first time.

Well, I started with that background to set the scene for this.

There used to be a bush, as in the past tense, out the back of our place. It was all green but that was OK because Grumbles (the ex-wife) said it had to stay but it needed pruning. It was on the list in the brief and I was tasked with the job.

Did I mention I was now unsupervised?

This bushy thing stood about 3m high and it was sort of going all fluffy and broad around the edges. A bit like me I suppose – broad in the middle and not much on height. Armed with the implements of destruction, I proceeded to skilfully and lightly prune the bush, or so I thought. While clearing up the debris after the pruning job, I proudly surveyed the scene. I thought I’d done a good job for my first major, unsupervised, pruning operation. Remember, she left me unsupervised. That’s important evidence in pleading my defence later.

The trouble is the supervisor didn’t agree that I had achieved the outcome she expected. She felt that reducing a bush to a single stick does not constituted a good pruning job. “But”, I cried in a whiney voice, “the bush doesn’t take up so much space now. Isn’t that why you wanted it pruned in the first place?”. This did not go over well. Never question the meaning of a woman’s specifications, especially when you, in their eyes, have just perpetrated some horrendous action.

“It will grow back” I pleaded. I think at this point I should have quietly submitted to my punishment. My grave was still shallow enough to get out of in time. But no, I doggedly continued my defence. I was politely informed, through clenched teeth, that secateurs are used for pruning bushes, not chainsaws. My grave was only three feet deep at this point. While on a roll, I sermonised my deeply-pondered logic that if it’s green and it needs keeping, it should be guarded in someway against accidental cutting. I continued with this theory and said that all gardens should have raised edges so that a mower cannot easily cross. People who put garden beds at the same level with the grass have no excuse. These gardens just become speed humps in the mowing cycle.

I must admit that Grumbles did learn early on, after losing her favourite rose bush, that if anything is to survive my mower, it has to be in a defined garden bed. My grave now was way above my head. Stupidly I didn’t stop there. I tried the approach that it was her fault because I was unsupervised. Wrong move!

So, how did the pruned bush go, I hear you ask? Well, two years after the pruning exercise, the bush is starting to grow back. It doesn’t look like a stick so much any more: it’s now a green stick. Grumbles is talking to me again and maybe in a couple more years I will be forgiven. I knew the bush would grow back and was very tempted to say “I told you so”. I believe my instincts for self preservation dominated and I didn’t mention it again.

So next time you’re contemplating doing some unsupervised pruning in the garden, make sure the requirements for the pruning are clearly defined and specific to prolong your harmonious existence on earth.

Have you ever stuffed-up in the garden? What’s your funniest garden bungle? Tell us in the comments below!