An enthusiastic gardener

I recently re-employed my old gardener who first worked for us when we moved to Kommetjie 31 years ago. He is probably the same age as us, but looks rather weathered through the hard life he has lived. We stopped having a gardener many years ago and I took over but it really is too big to keep my hand on and still do all the other things I have to do, like work sometimes.

He is an educated man and speaks with an educated accent. He can also read and write just like you and I and it is a great shame that circumstances have kept him where he is, but he has never complained about his life and maybe we shouldn't expect others to live as we think they ought. He has a house and he is getting a government pension soon, more than he has ever earned from gardening, so he is probably better off than most.

However, he is a trifle overzealous when it comes to cleaning up the garden. He will spend hours picking up all the leaves in the flowerbeds and under the trees and if you don't check on him often, as I didn't, you will find that 10 years of mulch and topsoil has been removed and the roots of the plants are exposed to open air! The worst part is that it was all lugged off to the local dump before I did an inspection, so I can only hope for the best and that all the leaves will accumulate again in as short a time as possible.

Today he popped in for a few hours' work before rain sets in and I asked him to prune the grape vines and pull out the grass around the cats' graves. About an hour later I heard a heavy chopping sound, which I could immediately identify as a spade hitting roots. I hotfooted it out into the garden to find out which tree was having its roots pruned and found he had dug a massive hole around the 30-year-old vine and was trying valiantly to chop through the tap root to take the stump out!

I didn't have the heart to tell him that it wasn't quite what I had in mind, so told him to just fill in the hole and leave the root to rot rather than put his back out. The only consolation is that the vine only bore the sourest of wine grapes, not table grapes, and was really more a decorative feature in summer than a source of fruit.

You don't even want to know what he did with the panga! Oh alright, I'll tell you. He trimmed the shoots which grow from the base of the trunk of the coprosmas rather enthusiastically and the poor trees have open wounds like polka dots, from which only time will tell if they recover.

At least he puts in an honest day's work even if the results are sometimes a little startling!