Garden Centre

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

What happened to the sounds of summer?

I’ve just got back from a week in France and there was one thing I couldn’t help noticing. Over there you could sit in the garden and hear very little but the sound of pigeons, neighbours picking figs and beans, and the occasional slosh of water from cans or hosepipes as it splashed over the huge leaves of courgettes and pumpkins.

But then I came back and took my morning cup of tea out into the garden on Sunday … to find myself surrounded by those traditional rural sounds: power washers cleaning 4x4 cars, hedge-cutters ripping through privet, wood chippers mashing up the trimmings produced by the hedge-cutters, tractor lawnmowers (why? Nobody around me has a lawn bigger than a couple of double sheets) and drills. There was somebody (presumably a man with a middle-aged crisis going on) working on the engine of his jetski who seemed to feel the need to rev the engine every two or three minutes for two or three hours …

At least I have some idea why. Apparently we Brits are spending more time gardening as the credit crunch bites home. According to Legal & General, 42% of us spent between £1 and £1000 on garden equipment or home improvements in June. Then investment group LV found more families are going on a ‘traditional bucket-and-spade seaside holiday’ in Britain this summer as 71% admitted being concerned about their finances. So it’s not surprising that the power tools have come out and the men of the house are wielding them – the logic must be that it’s cheaper to do home improvements themselves than to pay a professional to come and do it. And that means that my Sundays will be orchestrated by motor-mowers etc until the recession recedes again. I do wish we had more of the Indian style of lawn mower though – perhaps if things get bad enough, people will think the petrol costs are so high they’ll invest in an oxen-powered instead?

Lawnmower courtesy of foxypar4

Labels: garden sounds, lawn mowers, recession gardening

The All Seasons Gardener at 6:18 AM

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