It's opening time
The Sunday newspaper headlines today are full of hints and suggestions that garden centres might be open from mid-May. They also suggest that ministers have been slow to greenlight any such move for fear of enraging Boris, who, like the grizzly bear in the old John Lewis advert, is emerging from his Covid-19 sleep.
What took them so long?
Has anyone in government been to a garden centre? Do they all live in the city or have gardeners?
We are now well-versed with the ideas that make shopping safe. We stay 2 metres away, we queue outside supermarkets, we understand that one enters as one leaves – this is entirely possible in shops that have big aisles. Garden centres are blessed with generous aisles on which to place bags of compost and manure, the odd large shrub and an awkward shaped implement or wobbly planter. They have large car parks in which to form an orderly queue. They have all the infrastructure ready to go. The only time I ever come within 2 metres of anyone at a garden centre is when I pay, visiting them is a low-contact sport.
Garden centres are also located outside towns and cities and don’t rely on public transport to get their customers in. How many times have you seen someone with a 40-litre bag of John Innes No.1 on the bus? Never. So the re-opening of them doesn’t add to the burden on public transport.
There would be no need to open the gift areas, and we can exclude the lightweights who rush to the café for their five-item English breakfast, I’m talking about gardening items – the things that Maurice used to sell when everything at the Woodstock Lane garden centre was horticultural, with the exception of the goldfish and the ice-cream cabinet.
Gardening is good for mental health. Seeing the vegetables that you’ve just planted – in a renewed spurt of enthusiasm for grow-your-own – getting decimated by slugs because you have no slug pellets is bad for your mental health. And wandering around the profundity of new plants at the garden centre in Long Ditton of a Saturday is something that can only help.
The horticultural industry is one of those rare sectors where Britain still leads the world. The pre-eminent horticultural show is not the Paris Show (that would be all marigolds anyway), it’s the Chelsea Flower Show. That may have been cancelled this year, but the companies that supply it from across the UK will all be struggling in the current climate.
Garden Centres should be open now, not in a month’s time. Newsagents with narrow aisles are open because they sell newspapers and governments are afraid of newspapers. Re-opening garden centres would not constitute, the ‘thin end of the wedge’ or ‘the start of a slippery slope’, it’s one small step towards normality. And normality is what we all crave right now. Gardeners are by their very nature careful, watchful, hopeful people. It’s a very easy first step.
