Pest Control

A downside to living in rented accommodation is you can’t actually ‘do’ things to your house. Some people would see this as a blessing.  After all, part of the attraction of ex-pat life is the opportunity to explore, the last thing you want to be doing every weekend is a spot of DIY.

On the other hand, people like me who like to potter come unstuck.  My problem is I like gardening.  As with the interior cleaning schedule, our landlords left us specific instructions as to what we could and couldn’t do in their garden, and what ‘products’ we should use.

Now that we’ve visited a few Dutch historical houses and of course, the Keukenhof, I can see our garden pretty much follows the traditional formal design. It’s a ‘bijou’ space and I would imagine professionally designed.  There’s some very neat box hedging, and the small trees are shaped into espaliers. There isn’t a lot of option to change anything, even if I wanted to.

It’s many years since I had my third of an acre woodland to ‘potter in’ and to be honest, after a while such a large space did become a bit of chore – all that grass to cut, leaves to collect, a continual battle against the brambles. In the US, our first home had a concrete back yard and a pool, the second only had a balcony. I got my horticultural fix by volunteering in the Los Angeles Arboretum’s rose garden every week.  When we returned to the UK we chose a house with enough space for a lawn, a seating area and some borders. I re-designed it from scratch and lovingly filled it with my favourite plants.

Gardening is therapeutic. Need to release some aggression? Take out it on some weeds. Something bugging you?  Cut off a few dead heads. Feeling artistic? Prune. You can lose yourself in a garden; you can tame a jungle, design a tapestry, grow your own harvest.

Here in Holland I just sit. On those rare days when the sun comes out and the wind lulls to a gentle breeze, yes it is very soothing to relax in my oasis of green, but I’m just itching to do something. I’m willing those neat little box hedges to sprout so that I can snip off the straying shoots.

There’s no space to sow any seeds; no bare patches that need filling in. To be honest, there’s hardly any weeds. I wander around the local garden centre, browsing the shelves, envious of those customers loading up their trolleys.  It is probably a good thing I have to cycle there and back as it severely restricts what I can buy. I have yet to acquire the balancing skills of the Dutch. I cannot cycle one handed whilst the other clings on to my over-ambitious purchases. The most I’ve managed so far as a tray of twelve pansy plants – six of which fitted into my basket, the others had to be unceremoniously cast into a carrier bag and slung over the handlebars.

The nearest garden centre is less than half a mile away, which is walkable, but as my mother-in-law can probably confirm, that’s a lot further than it seems when you are carrying a big bag of compost (I didn’t force her to carry it – she INSISTED).  Plants here are cheap and the Dutch are very much into growing their own.  I am determined to squeeze in pots of tomatoes and salad leaves but even my pot standing space is limited.

I know I should learn to admire and appreciate what I have. To this end I have followed my landlord’s instructions regarding pest control to the letter.  I just hope the slugs find the local craft beer a lot tastier than the hostas.