Everything in the garden is not rosy. It’s not even green; it’s yellow or brown, or yellow with brown spots. It’s my third summer and it has all gone wrong. The various pollinator-friendly flower seeds I carefully planted and tended managed to produce the grand total of: one self-seeded weed. Any flowers that predated – and survived – my arrival have fallen over and are lolling on the ground. The apples all fell off the tree and are rotting in a wasp-infested heap that smells like a cider festival toilet. My sole success, a Central American vine, succumbed to some novel plague this week.
Worst of all were the tomatoes: one day fine (to my ignorant eye), the next, catastrophic blight. “All my precious ones,” I whispered, like a character from a Jacobean tragedy whose children have been murdered, clutching putrid brown bunches to my chest. That’s it for me and tomatoes: I can’t go through that again. Every time I go outside, something else has died. I don’t want to be overly dramatic, but my happy place now feels like a plague house (OK, fine, I do want to be overly dramatic).
