Be brave and face up to the horrors of horticulture

SWINDON’S own Melinda Messenger has teamed up with a firm called Travis Perkins to celebrate the best commercial landscaping in the town.

This is a great idea, as the decent landscapers far outnumber the cowboys, and the competition will be a great way of separating one group from the other.

What a pity there isn’t something similar for non-commercial landscaping; something to recognise the heroes among us who face our landscaping tasks equipped with nothing more than a dream and some random stuff from the shed.

In fact, we could have a series of awards across a variety of categories, such as Nastiest Surprise Lurking Beneath the Surface.

This would be for anyone who’s finally got around to digging a pond or turning over a new flower bed, only to wish they hadn’t. Perhaps the garden turns out to have been used as a pet cemetery by the previous owners, for example. Perhaps it’s a newish home on part of a site owned in the 1970s by a firm with a name such as Happy Not In Any Way Dangerous Nuclear Waste Disposal Ltd, and your cauliflowers currently illuminate the garden at about 900 candlepower apiece.

Or perhaps your garden’s now a big hole in the ground, and the last thing you remember before waking up in hospital was spotting a swastika on that rusty old ‘drainpipe’ you thought you’d uncovered.

Another category would be Most Frightening Unwanted Plant Stirred Up By Unwise Digging, which would recognise horticultural horrors whose hitherto dormant seeds and spores had sprouted on being disturbed. Entries might be supported by photographic evidence of a small child being seized by a tendril or a family pet being dissolved by a coating of corrosive sap.

The category of Most Inappropriate Implement For The Job would recognise special ingenuity in home landscaping. This would be ideal for anybody who’s attempted to do a spot of dead-heading with a strimmer because they can’t be bothered rummaging behind the old bikes in the shed for the secateurs.

Or attempted to cut down a tree with a pickaxe. Or reasoned that although they didn’t have a flamethrower to get rid of the thickest undergrowth at the bottom of the garden, they could probably get similar results simply by chucking a load of petrol on it and striking a light.

Extra points in this category would go to any amateur landscaper whose injuries were written up by an A&E doctor in a medical journal.

I reckon an especially popular category would be Most Outrageous Landscaping Based On An Idea had while drunk.

This would be for anybody who’s ever had one over the eight and decided their garden could do with a 20ft waterfall, a wall of death, an underground bunker or something similar. A related category would recognise the householder who then had to spend the most cash on having a proper landscaper come in and put things right.

There would be bonus points for any entrant who managed to get themselves prosecuted for endangering neighbouring structures or poisoning the water table.

In a slightly related category, an award would be given to the amateur landscaper who took the least time to jack in all garden improvement work forever, go to the pub instead and later decide to have the whole lot paved.