Day 23 - Got any grass, man?

A final word about volunteers. Fairly soon after I started on this job, a gentleman approached me and offered his services to help with lawn edging. Given that we had several miles of this to do, and that we had just lost the part-time pensioner who used to do it, I accepted his offer. He was a marvellous man, and I had huge affection for him. We never knew when he would be coming. Sometimes he would turn up, do his work and leave without us ever knowing he had been. Other times he would join us for tea, tell us stories and have a laugh with us. Occasionally he would pass us in his car when leaving and announce, 'I've done the South Side today. Back on Thursday for the North!'. He had 'done' half the garden in a couple of hours, when it would have taken us days. I must qualify here, though. He wasn't a particularly good edger. His work lacked precision, tidiness. But what it lacked in finesse, it made up for in speed. We could always tidy up later when we were working through the borders, but we could do it at our leisure, knowing that he had prevented us the embarrassment of having edges a foot long. Bear in mind that if he had done a good job, he wouldn't have been as much help, because he would never have completed the task.

This calls for some practical instruction. There is a particular technique required with long-handled edging shears. First, they do not make them left-handed. They are designed for working anti-clockwise, or from right to left. Edging shears are discriminatory. Secondly, they are designed for two hands, each fulfilling a different discrete purpose. The left hand is to guide the bottom blade along the edge of the turf. Its sole function is to hold that blade parallel to the edge to be cut, and as close as possible. The right hand is the one which does the cutting, by bringing the top blade down to shear against the bottom one. You should never be moving both hands at once. It should go thus: left hand steer, right hand cut, left hand steer, right hand cut. When you get into a rhythm it is simple, and you can guarantee a nice regular edge. Flap at it with both elbows going like a bellows and you get edges that look like they have been grazed off by cattle, all zig-zags and crookedness. The problem is, that once you are in bad habits it is very difficult to get out of them. I have tried to teach many people how to do it properly and watched them succumb to the temptation to revert to type.

Our man was a flapper, but it didn't matter, what we needed was speed. We could always provide the quality later. He was also an underwater hero of the 2nd World War, a submarine commander, as were his whole family. They have their own display cabinet in the Submarine Museum. A fine example of a man, and of just what a volunteer should be. He had identified a need that we had, and applied himself to fulfilling it. Nothing more, nothing less. One hundred percent giving. And with humour. He worked on with us well into his eighties.

I'm going to step back a bit now, to my first weeks on the new job. I'd been looking round the garden, familiarising myself with the plants and the problems ahead. The place was overgrown, everything needed pruning, vistas were disappearing, yew trees were collapsing all over the place and everywhere was infested with weeds. So far, so straightforward. That was all gardening work. I could handle that. But when I started poking my nose into the old wooden sheds, which stood open to allcomers, unlocked, then I found something much more worrying.

As this was an occupied property there were people milling about the whole time, whether we were there or not, and there was no security about our garden buildings, which were quite extensive. There were children on site too, and we all know how nosy they can be. This lot proved to be particularly intrusive in time.

Under these circumstances I got a bit of a fright when I started investigating what these sheds contained. There had never been a chemical store on the premises, secured, ventilated and locked. There had been no such regulations in force through most of the life of the garden. And until recently there had never been any children living here. The first shed I entered had a huge cardboard drum three-quarters full of Sodium Chlorate, a nasty total weedkiller, designed to stop all plant growth for eternity. The drum was collapsing under the dampness of the cardboard. Then I discovered in another shed a tin, which on investigation contained cyanide for the control of rabbits. But my most unexpected find, and almost as frightening as the tin of deadly poison, was a container of DDT which I thought had been outlawed for about thirty years by that time. For the purpose of compiling this report, I have looked it up, and am surprised to discover that it was not banned in this country until 1984, unless Wikipedia is lying to me. This means it was only six years out of date when I found it. Nevertheless, its reputation was such that I was struck with terror on discovering it. I had to push for additional funding to arrange for correct disposal of all these items, and had to prioritise a list of the worst offences, as the £2000 I was allowed was insufficient to deal with everything I found. And of course, by spending the money on that, there would be all the less available for purposes that would have more of an impact for the visiting public. I could hardly expect people to pay to come in and look at the spaces where the cyanide and DDT had been, could I?

I suppose I ought to count myself lucky that the garden had any insect life at all to sustain it, although I could well understand why they wanted to do away with the rabbits which were treating the place as a banquet. Time to calm down, and take everything one slow step at a time.