Shrubbery coffins

Oh some would call these receptacles of all things flowery plant pots but in our hands they are ovalised death zones, black holes of destruction, the terracotta personification of abandon hope all yea who enter here“. We’re plant killers you see, not by choice but, for reasons which escape us, anything which flowers stands more of a chance of survival planted at ground zero during an atomic explosion. A lot more chance.

As we weeble towards the door wobblying under a hundred quids worth of soon to be organic cadavers, you can almost hear a nasty whisper from the surviving plants welcome to the valley of death”. For a sweet but short moment our latest compost food looks exactly like the little card accompanying it. Latterly these are papery gravestones spread throughout the garden each marking the final resting place of a once lovely bloom. Sometimes accompanied by pathetically sad lifeless stems but mostly positioned over an unhealthy brown sludge that was once a flower and before that, money.

Thing is we have almost no trouble with other plantlife – Fruit, vegetables and of course weeds flower (sic) with wild abandon. It’s like a bloody cottage industry especially the legions of fruit marching up the garden garrisoning flowerbeds and annexing new territory through perennial summer campaigns. We have a rhubarb auditioning for the main part of the Rocky Horror Show and sufficient raspberry’s to power the WI for a thousand years.

It’s the kids I feel sorry for, here’s a random dinnertime conversation which captures their horror:

What’s for tea, please not more raspberry’s?”
No, no, way better than that, Raspberry Surprise”
Suspicious: What’s the surprise”
Raspberry and Rhubarb pie with unidentified green stuff”
Plaintive: Aw Dad”
Play your cards right and it’s Rhubarb Crumble for afters with a slug’n’snail custard”

But flowers, no. Buy ˜em, plant ˜em, kill ˜em. The planticide register reads:

Hoster: Death by drowning
Snowdrop: Slug attack
Tulip
: Cat Strike
Very expensive purple thing: Burned to a crisp.

I could go on but you get the idea. Even the houseplants that survive our frankly woeful watering regime succumb to greenfly, whitefly or occasionally I think lose the will to live.

But the solution is at hand. A quick wibbly scan shows me plastic flowers of almost every description. Surely, not even we could kill those? In the meantime, I’m going to harvest the raspberries.

With a chainsaw.

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