A Poisoned Chalice

learning the hard way

Look at my gunnera!

Funny story. Although not funny haha, more funny peculiar. Tipping into tragic if you don’t measure it against what real tragedy is, like death, war, illness etc. It’s not that sort of awful. I’ll just set the scene.

Our garden slopes up behind the house and is split into three. The first part is small and a riot of wild and weeds, with a path strimmed through it past the silver birch to the cabin. Named The Bolthole when we turned it into a holiday rental and needed it to sound like somewhere you would pay to escape to, it is now a workspace/evening hangout/storage facility. Steve and I work at a table pushed up against one wall under the window, with a view of the apple tree and a glimpse of the church roof through the branches. Outside is a gravelled courtyard edged with clambering roses (forget the name of them), honeysuckle and clematis.

Keep going, duck under a leaning tree and you come out into the third and largest part of the garden, with the monstrous gunnera, raised veg beds, a small pond that needs serious attention, more tall weeds and a steaming compost heap. It’s not huge, but big enough to overpower us and encroached by nature, so it requires concerted relentless effort to keep on top of it. I am not sure what ‘on top of it’ looks like because we have never got there.

This summer, Steve has been on a mission to grow as much as possible. As those of you who have read my book will know, this achieves two things. It eases his mental load, giving him a focus and respite from the everyday and it produces gluts which go into the kitchen and the honesty box. We planned to harvest enough to do both over the summer and autumn months, and I was looking forward to posting regular updates here. You note, I use the past tense.

Somehow, in amongst the rewilding areas, where we have seen bees, slow worms, grass snakes and butterflies, a deadly invader was in our midst, and we didn’t know it. Poison hemlock had been digging its vile fat parsnip roots into our soil, silently tucking itself in to its new home and growing undiscovered, until its white flowers burst forth. What first appeared to be dratted hogweed, was in fact Agatha Christie’s murder weapon of choice in Five Little Pigs. When the trial of Socrates concluded in 399 BC, what was his death sentence? A chalice of poison hemlock.

If it had been a simple matter of disposal we wouldn’t be having this conversation. General advice is to wear protective clothing, dig up the roots, seal them in black plastic bags and put them in the general waste bin. Except, before identification, Steve had unwittingly dealt with an overgrown patch of ground and chucked the cuttings on the compost, so couldn’t be certain that this hadn’t included a couple of the fledgling killers which will have contaminated the precious fertiliser.

We talked to garden expert friends who all reacted in the same way. A raised eyebrow, a low whistle, a slow shake of the head, a double check that we were absolutely sure it was hemlock. I have seen this behaviour before, usually directed at my car, when told there is nothing more to be done for it. The collective horticultural advice was that it may be OK if the compost had reached a certain nuclear temperature. Of that we couldn’t be sure.

We walked around the garden, trying to remember which veg beds had been topped up with our home nurtured compost, a process lovingly tended by Steve over the last couple of years and came to the conclusion that, even if they hadn’t, we weren’t going to risk it. What if we had remembered wrongly? Shudder.

Now, this is gutting. Particularly for Steve who has grown all the veg from seed this year. He has been out in the dark, head torch on, weeding, staking, planting and slug hunting. He has made fleecy polytunnels for each of the raised beds and tucked them in every night. To now watch everything burgeoning and reaching their delicious picking point, knowing that he quite literally cannot enjoy the fruits of his labours is a type of agony. There was 24 hours where this took him to a dark exhausted place and a futility settled over us both.

But I can be irritatingly Pollyanna about some things, and this was one of them. Firstly, we will still be able to pick the sweet peas and sunflowers we planted, shoving them in to all available spaces which should give us a bumper crop. Secondly, this will make Steve stop, put down the wheelbarrow and pull up a chair. He has not sat in the garden this year. He continually prowls around it, working in spots of shade, not able to relax and enjoy the peace and beauty of his surroundings. This is an enforced abandonment for him, and after his initial frustrations and self-loathing, there is a sense of relief. As if someone has physically wrenched the spade from his hands and given him no choice in the matter. Silver linings, my friends.

Yes, it is a complete waste, and it will be painful to pick produce we will not be able to eat or share, but we can still have the joy of sitting amongst it. Probably while we google how to get the soil tested for the harmful alkaloids. And there will be a profusion of flowers. It also means our honesty box will have a fallow year and instead we will spend some time building a small but sturdy structure ready for next spring. More than ever I will be on the look out for other people’s garden gate stalls.

Steve and I have been gardening together, to varying degrees, for nearly 20 years and we are still learning, but this is a timely reminder of enjoying whatever point we get to. There is always next year.

NB If anyone has any additional knowledge on this sort of hemlock catastrophe, I would love to hear it.