Where OAPs Get Their Goat

The best place to hang out on a Saturday afternoon is the big garden centre, it’s just like ‘the mall’ for OAPs…

One of the central tenets of the Grumpy Gardener’s Handbook is putting jobs off till tomorrow that you could do today. Just as Thompson and Morgan send me a list of jobs I could be doing in the garden in January, I have the opposing list of jobs that I could put off till February. All things must be in balance.

I really should have cut the grass on Saturday, but if we get another cold snap, the grass will stop growing again and I can maybe leave it another three weeks. So how else am I going to kill time on a Saturday…? After a routine inspection of where the squirrels have got up to in their excavation of every pot in the garden, what better thing to do than visit the garden centre.

When you visit a garden centre these days, the predominant hair colour is white.

A big garden centre is really like the shopping mall for teenagers. Teenagers have nothing to do, so they head off to the shopping mall to kill time, see their friends and hang around. It’s the same for pensioners. They pile into their Honda Civics and go and hang out at the garden centre, to see what’s going down between the bird-feeders and the super-insulated gloves.

Instead of getting a posse of girls hanging around outside Claire’s Accessories saying “look at the state of her”, there are gangs of silver-haired old girls saying “look at the state of those delphiniums”.

While at the mall, they all pile into McDonalds and spend an hour over a vanilla thickshake. At the garden centre the OAP squad pile into the tea-room and spend an hour lounging around with a pot of English breakfast and a blueberry muffin, “Oh, that’s too much for me, you have half.”

The comparisons aren’t always exact. At the garden retail hangout there’s less flirting, less shoplifting but a lot more support clothing. And there’s very little conversation about spots – unless it’s the spot where they left their Toyota Aygo, they really hope they can remember – “at Wisley the other day it took twenty minutes to find it!”

When it comes to getting a few laughs, for the teenagers it’s the offensive T-shirts they could be wearing. “Put that on and your mum’ll freak out!” At the garden centre there’s still the opportunity to go out on a style limb, the chance to be radical and offensive.

It’s very difficult to get hold of good quality gnomes these days, but there’s no difficulty in picking up a line of meerkats or the odd quirky statue. And we all know that one person’s ‘quirky garden statue’ is another person’s ‘why don’t you take that straight to the dump?’

In recent times there’s been an upsurge in shabby chic and you can find rusty-welded, garishly painted animals to stick in between your petunias. They may look like something your uncle Colin welded together from an old Austin 1100 sub-frame in his garage, but these ‘objets d’art’ retail at eye-watering prices. How about a little red rusty rooster for £199, a shabby chic sheep for £299 or a lonely goat for £249?

Come home from the garden centre with a car-load of these and the lovely silven-haired old dears may well find they’ve got something in common with their mall-loitering grandchildren. “You’re grounded!”