Next week is ‘Hug a Slug’ week.
Well, come on, you did believe it for a couple of seconds. We’ve all grown so used to the fog of humourless eco-rectitude that has settled over our gardens that you probably didn’t even blink. No right-thinking (let alone left-thinking) person these days would dream of paving their front garden (bad for drainage), using a bag of peat-based compost (very un-green) or a nice toxic pesticide. It’s all too feasible to imagine we might suddenly to be told by the RSPCA that slugs had rights too.
The apparently innocent world of gardens, dedicated, you might suppose, to pleasure (both private and in the public sphere); to aesthetic delight and intellectual challenge, has been taken over by the righteous brigade. We must fill our wheelbarrows with guilt and garden for the planet rather than for the fun of it. And this message doesn’t just come from the controlling left, but from the heart of the establishment, the home of the glossy Chelsea Flower Show and garden swank: the Royal Horticultural Society.
A recent article in the RHS magazine, The Garden, gave frivolous gardeners a ticking off: ‘British gardeners ship supports such as bamboo canes in from around the world. We generate rubbish that has to be driven to the dump. We use petrol or electricity to power lawn-mowers, man-made nitrogen fertilisers to keep things growing, and peat-based composts because we believe they help us grow things a little better (and more cheaply) than peat-free alternatives.’
So should we then stop growing vegetables and fruit? After all, canes and fertilisers are used most by those who grow carrots and lettuces and both are largely unnecessary in an ornamental garden. But of course the eco-politics aren’t that simple.
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