What I have learned in my filthy, bloody, sisyphean quest to tame my garden | Adrian Chiles

There’s no such thing as gardener’s block, I once read. This from, I believe, a famous writer who was making the point that if you’ve got writer’s block, you should just go and do something else for a bit. Point taken. There is no such thing as gardener’s block because if you get stuck doing one job, even in the smallest garden, there are roughly 10m other jobs you can be cracking on with. Which is quite right. And this is what makes gardening either the worst thing for you if – like me – you have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or possibly the best.

I stride into the garden full of purpose and ambition, with a smile on my face. Invariably, several hours later, I stagger out of there, aching all over, scratched, bloodied, filthy and demoralised, having dug, scraped, cursed and carried myself to physical and mental exhaustion. The clarity of purpose I have at the outset vanishes very quickly, along with my secateurs. In its place, as things that need doing proliferate around me like Japanese knotweed, there comes a confusion of purpose. Lots gets done a little bit, but nothing gets done properly. Nothing is finished. And it all looks a right bloody mess.

Here’s how it unfolds. Having learned that just wandering into the garden and getting on with something is a recipe for instant chaos, I delay the chaos by deciding in advance which job I am to tackle. Clever, eh? So intense is my focus that if I have made the decision the night before, I will often dream about it. To be clear, we’re not talking about anything particularly ambitious here, some great landscaping endeavour that might make it on to Gardeners’ World; far from it.

Typically, I’ll undertake merely to tidy up one small corner of the garden, perhaps a little patch of ground the size of a modest dinner table. The dog, downbeat at the realisation that we have not come outside for a walk, sighs and slumps to the ground. He’ll watch me for hours, utterly without interest. I mutter an apology to him, fall to my knees over the planned patch of earth and commence tearing at weeds, stringy bits of old plants and so on.

I soon realise that I haven’t got anything next to me in which to put what I’m tearing out. I get up and go in search of a bucket. Now, what did I do with all my big buckets and tubs? On my way to fetch something suitable, I spy a bit of ivy or honeysuckle somewhere I don’t want it. I start pulling and it keeps coming. And coming. Soon I am a magician at a kids’ party, pulling an apparently endless string of knotted handkerchiefs out of a trouser pocket. Except there are no squeals of delight and amusement at my efforts, just the blank stare of a disconsolate dog.

It feels as if there’s no end to the ivy, honeysuckle and whatnot because, it turns out, there is indeed no end. The more fanatically I seek it and pull it, the more I add to the giant tangle at my feet. Eventually, I can take no more, admit failure and try to remember what I was originally doing. Oh yes, need a big bucket for the weeds. I’ll need a much bigger bucket for the bird’s nest I’ve just created, but that can wait.

I return to the original patch of ground and start making real progress. This is more like it. But then I come across a root of something that won’t come out. I dig around it with the trowel I’ll inevitably soon lose, but it’s not shifting. Right, I’ll teach this bastard a lesson, I grunt, and go in search of a proper spade. In the unlikely event that I find one, I return to the root. I dig around it, flinging dirt everywhere, tug at it and find it’s not yielding, so I dig some more. The more stubborn it is, the more stubborn I get. Two can play at this game. Deeper and deeper I go until not much more than the soles of my boots are visible poking out the top of the hole. I look up to see the dog peering down at me, into the abyss. In a moment, surely, I’ll pull and the root will come out; I will have won. But it doesn’t and this madness, too, must stop.

I reach for my big anvil lopper, poke it right down into the depths of the hole and sever the wretched root. But there’s no dressing it up; the moral victory isn’t mine. Root one, me nil. I fling it away in fury, only for the dog to fetch it. He thinks fun time has come. How very wrong he is.

I’m so fed up with myself that I turn to something else, perhaps taking out my frustration on a tree or a bush that may or may not need attacking with the lopper I happen to have in my hand. More debris lies around me. I gather it all up and dump it somewhere I’ll chance upon when it’s semi-decomposed in many years’ time. I go back to the hole and fill it up so that I can begin forgetting my root failure, doubtless burying the trowel in the process.

So where’s the upside for me? Well, not every gardening day is like the one above. Modern life, with smartphones and social media and stuff, is undoubtedly a vector for ADHD. But if you’ve got it, everything is potentially a vector for it. Even something as ageless as a garden. So, recognising this, I have a word with myself and try to see it as a metaphor for all of life. I try to learn from it. That is, recognise I can’t do everything all at once, that there’s no such thing as perfection, that it’s fine to let your focus flit around a bit, just not too much.

Above all, in a garden more than anywhere, understand that life is about patience and that hiding in plain sight in the galaxy of distractions are countless little miracles you can lose yourself in: a mere snowdrop or the first yellow flower on a forsythia.

Unfortunately, both of these things herald the coming of spring. Everything is going to start growing again. Panic back on. Now, where in God’s name have I left my spade?

Adrian Chiles is a writer, broadcaster and Guardian columnist

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