Feeling virtuous this morning?
Published:
ARE you? Have you signed up to any of the weight-loss initiatives that usually crop up at this time of the year? Are you determined to shed a few of the unwanted pounds that have appeared from nowhere over the last several weeks?
If you are a gardener, you really don’t need to change the habits of a lifetime. A report published before the turn of the year says that just 30 minutes of physical work in the garden can earn a significant calorie loss.
Top of the table comes a little bit of digging, something you could be engaged in at this time. Thirty minutes on the spade will shed 250 calories. If you still have lots of raking to do, collecting leaves and preparing to compost them, not only are you doing your bit for the environment, your calorie tariff is 100 calories – remember, that’s for just 30 minutes.
Come the growing season, know that mowing the lawn burns 195 calories, and weeding, would you believe, rates at 105 calories per half-hour.
How often have you heard me say it? Why pay to burn calories in a poncey gym – with all the expense of having to “look good” for the occasion and having to drive the car however many miles – when you can slip on the old wellies and get oot the back door on to the plot?
It’s a win-win situation. I do realise that some of you value the visit to the gym from a social-contact angle – meet the chums and aw that. If that is important in your life, get an allotment, if you can.
These nuggets of information come from the offices of the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA), which has a vested interest, of course, but in my view, it is actually putting a value on the obvious, which ticks the right boxes for me because the sound advice is laced with a fair measure of altruism.
The same organisation comes up with a few more juicy bits. Apparently, plants and gardens have a huge impact on our emotional and mental wellbeing; so much so that just 20 minutes spent in a green environment – parks, gardens, Duthie Park Winter Gardens – has an extremely valuable calming effect on people.
Most of us involved in horticulture, gardening, countryside pursuits and sailing – anything that puts us in real, physical touch with the world that surrounds us, including the birds and the bees – know this to be a fact.
HTA is restating these points in a modern way – with the benefits of medical and scientific research to prove it beyond reasonable doubt. Goodness knows how many millions are spent on proving what has often cynically been regarded as “auld wives’ tales”.
Grow some of your own fruit and vegetables, keep a lovely garden or have a window box full of colour and scent and you will benefit from the exercise in doing so – and the time spent in the process is good for the soul, good for the mind and good for the health. That’s gardening.
I have said it hosts of times, but I will again – gardening is like music. Think about that. You can be a spectator or you can get involved. At any level, at any time from early childhood to dotage, you can have as little or as much of it as you please.
There are no barriers of age, sex, colour, creed, rich, poor, fully fit or less so. You can enjoy it with any or all the senses. It is good for mind and body – case closed.
Winter colour
I was chatting to a chap in the train coming back from Edinburgh the other day, as one does, and for some reason, he opened the conversation by commenting that the aconites were flowering in his garden (it happens all the time – it goes with the job). He got off at Dundee to head home to Invergowrie, where he lives quite close to the River Tay.
As soon as I arrived home, I had a look to see if there was any colour in our little colony – no luck, there isn’t even the sign of a bud.
To compensate, I have to say that quite a few of the snowdrops are beginning to open up, but that is not really the reason for the heading.
En route to the aconite patch, first I passed a Viburnum x bodnantense “Dawn” right by the edge of the path. It has been flowering since early-November and, apart from enjoying the bunches of fresh pink flowers, in still conditions, the scent is delightful.
Rounding the corner of the building, I caught another wee whiff of something. It was the winter box, more correctly known as Sarcococca, a native of western China.
Sadly, because it is a low-growing little shrub and the white flowers are quite small and often obscured by the foliage, this is not a particularly popular plant.
Nonetheless, there is a very pleasant perfume from these little flowers through late autumn and winter. If you can find the right spot for it – near a pedestrian route in the garden that is used regularly, especially in winter – then it would serve you well.
Beyond the said aconite patch, I could see, in the gathering gloom, the pale, creamy yellow flowers of our witch hazel, a majestic shrub that can grow quite big – two metres plus in height and the same across – but it is very slow-growing. It is another plant with an intriguing perfume from little flowers that look like a bad haircut.
Beginning to feel the evening chill, I hurried back into the house through our garden room, which is chock-a-block with some of my favourite plants – camellias.
Planted in the ground against the back wall and beginning to flower its head off is “Donation”, one of the most reliable and popular varieties in this country.
There are several other beginning to open their first buds and soon the place will be ablaze with pinks, yellows and reds. These plants are being grown in pots in an effort to keep them down to a manageable size.
PS: This week, I will be bringing my pot-grown apples into the glasshouse in the back garden to induce early growth/flowering. They will have had enough “coolth” for this winter.
Readers' Comments