Sometimes It’s Best to Stay out of the Rain

I suppose that one of the advantages of hanging out at the Garden Collective is the opportunity to unburden oneself. Not something that many conventional garden publications tend to encourage. It is perhaps a place for honesty: to shrug on one’s horsehair shirt, beat the breast and proclaim a mea-culpa.I might have built that up a bit more than intended but I have one such confession to get off my chest (there may well be others but let us start modestly).

As gardeners we are supposed to be hearty and embrace nature at every opportunity. We like people to believe that we are never happier than when we are out there, no matter the weather, indulging in all sorts of energetic horticulture. We dig with gusto, prune with panache and weed with wanton abandon. We are supposedly happiest when thigh deep in brambles or careering around on a throbbingly butch mowing machine.

Drip, drip, drip....

This is usually true however, there are some days when I look out of the window and decide - No, today I am not going outside at all. It is cold and generally vile and my time would be better spent inside watching old films instead. There is a guilty pleasure to be found in the sort of rain into which nobody in their right mind would venture. The refreshing nature of summer and autumn showers have given way to miserable midwinter rain, the Mr Hyde of precipitation- it is raw, icy and unwelcome.

You know what I mean - the sky will be lowering and full of empty menace (this is not thunderstorm rain, that is much more fun, this is shivery rain: cold fat drops that paradiddle on skylights and hammer on windows. The sort that drips down your spine like melting sorbet, makes your teeth chatter and your fingers feel chilled and loveless like dead fish in a bucket.It is dirty rain where every drop encapsulates a helping of mud which smears windows and cakes cars.

December is grim but we coat it with tinsel and overindulgence to get us through to the end of the year but, to be honest, that is like the proverbial lipstick on a pig and by about December 29th that illusion has been returned to the attic and we have January to get over. There is New Year's Eve but, having lived through a lot of those, that is almost invariably the most disappointing evening of the year. The days may be getting longer and the odd snowdrop may be making its presence felt but it is still a long and miserable route march towards spring. Surely, the cold relentless battering is best observed from a warm house or, if going out is truly unavoidable, then from inside a commodious set of thermal waterproofs.

Water, water everywhere

What makes it worse is that it seems so wasteful as winter rain (while good at filling reservoirs) does not really benefit our gardens. The plants don’t need it and all it seems to create is even more mud. This is particularly frustrating as we have only recently endured a dry summer where any shower, no matter how cursory, was to be welcomed. Now there is too much rain to capture - the butts are overflowing and we have no use for the stuff. Perhaps there is somewhere in the garden where we can put an enormous storage tank?

At moments like this the garden can go and hang itself for all I care: not for me the squelchiness of wet muddy gloves and the slowly creeping arthritic ache of muddy knees so sod the lot of you. I am sure everyone feels like that sometimes - except maybe Monty Don whose garden is mostly underwater in winter but he will still be out there oiling his secateurs or wrangling a dog. I bet he never looks out of the window and offers up a secret fist pump that it is raining so hard that it would be foolhardy to venture outside.

Sofa time

For now let’s hunker down for the garden will wait another week or so. I have a selection of films to which I return again and again when the weather stinks or I am ill or for the last couple of hours of a long and tedious journey. They include (and this really has nothing at all to do with gardening) three volumes of That’s Entertainment (a collection of the best bits from MGM Musicals introduced by such legends as Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor and loads of others). To Catch a Thief (a Hitchcock film with Grace Kelly at her most entrancing and Cary Grant sporting a loosely knotted neckerchief), Kelly’s Heroes (because of Telly Savalas and Donald Sutherland) and the original Karate Kid (“Polish on, Polish off”).

This too will pass, it will get better: the rain will cease and the sky will brighten. Already the days are longer and beneath the soil there are roots roiling and shoots fattening. But, for now, a heaped fire, a well watched copy of A Bridge Too Far and a Tunnock's Teacake are all a chap really needs.

Cover image by Tomasz Ludwig