Slugs in Ottawa, slugs in the garden

(May 26) - I am an avid gardener in the way Brian Mulroney is an avid truth teller. We do our best, but it doesn’t always work out as we hoped.

The difference is in the consequences. They are always there when I fall down. If I sprinkle grass seed where periwinkle would have been happier, I wake up the next morning to a blooming field of dandelions. He forgets he got an envelope full of thousand-dollar bills, and no worries. That’s Brian all over, we say.

It’s quite understandable. If I was distracted by unifying Germany, ending apartheid and implementing the GST I’d have never even thought about the periwinkle option for the front yard.

Saving the garden and saving the world are two of the most challenging activities you can be involved in. I know, because I’ve tried them both. The hard part about saving the world is finding more than half a dozen people to sit down and listen to you at the same time.

The hard part about saving the garden is everything. It’s a lot easier to get rid of the slugs in Ottawa than the ones on your front lawn. That’s doubly true when you’re the sort of person who’d rather have a cruddy lawn than a neighbour with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

I used to think the mark of a successful gardener was getting through Victoria Day without having the fruits of your labour done in by frost.

This year, the May 24 was a horrible experience for people and plants. It was cold. It was damp. It was a misery, but nothing I planted was hurt by the neo-winter weather. The main reason for this is that I hadn’t planted anything. Perennials that turn a scornful eye at February blizzards couldn’t care less about a miserable day in May.

I am on a gardening mission. The aim is to enter a horticultural heaven where lawn mowers are as welcome as Karlheinz Schreiber at a Conservative convention.

Several paths lead to this goal. The ones I’m exploring are made of stone. Dry stacked walls. Flagstone paths. Gravel trails. They define garden areas, separated by judiciously planted ground cover.

Books by Lois Hole and other experts help us choose what to plant and where. It appears we can walk on a spread of wooly thyme as comfortably as we can on an expanse of lush lawn.

A lot of people are rushing to the conclusion that those who want to walk on a lawn fit for a putting stroke should go to the country club and pay their green fees.

In his poem Mending Wall, Robert Frost said “before I built a wall I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offence.”

Walls don’t separate, they join. There are dry stack walls in Europe that have stood for thousands of years. Look over a landscape and see how they link one field to another. Get up close and see how changing vegetation and unchanging stone come together in perfect harmony.

The easy part about this approach to gardening is that I don’t have to do it myself. There are talented stone workers in town who are happy to do it for me. Of course, they want to be paid for their labour, and that’s only fair.

The thing that’s not fair is the deep distinction between me and Brian Mulroney. When I suffer the consequences of unsuccessful gardening, the cost comes out of my bank account.

When it happens to a former Prime Minister, everyone pays the bill but him.