Emma Cowing: ‘Words such as topsoil, compost, and double digging have taken on a deeply exotic allure’

‘I HAVE to have them,” I informed a friend as I stopped, transfixed, outside the window of a shoe shop. “The suede heels?” she asked. “They’d suit you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I retorted. “I’m talking about those.” I pointed to a pair of hot pink Hunter Wellington boots tucked away in the corner.

“Oh God,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Not this again.”

I have, or so I am told, become a gardening bore. Night after night I sit up in bed, immersing myself in books on how to banish blight from potatoes while listening to re-runs of Gardeners’ Question Time on iPlayer. Online, I sift longingly through websites promising mimosa seed pods and jaunty trowels. Words such as “topsoil”, “compost”, and “double digging” have taken on a deeply exotic allure.

Now I suppose all this might have made sense had I ever actually done any gardening. But the truth of the matter is I have never even looked a garden hoe in the handle. My fingernails remain unsullied by garden grit. And I have yet to set foot in a garden centre.

The reason for my newfound green-fingered fascination is simple. All being well, I will shortly move house, and the new gaff has a garden, something I haven’t had since I was a teenager. I am ludicrously excited about this. The fact that my moving date coincides with the onset of yet another snowbound Arctic winter is, I keep telling myself, a mere detail.

I see myself, rake in hand, spending Sunday afternoons diligently working away on the flower beds. I envisage tending to baby crops of tomatoes, courgettes and aubergines with all the love and care of a new mother, and growing enormous pots of fragrant kitchen herbs round the front door.

Most importantly, I see myself sharing the spoils. Last week I went to friends for Sunday lunch, and we ate roast potatoes that minutes before had been nestling under the ground in a veg patch outside the dining room window. Before I had even put down my knife and fork I was imagining something similar – a veritable feast of roasted spaghetti squash with freshly picked salad leaves conjured up from a bulging yet orderly vegetable garden. This would be followed by a dessert of roasted figs plucked from my very own fig tree, adorned with a section of lovingly hand-reared edible flowers. Oh dear.

Perhaps the reason my ideas are so grandiose is that as a child I was thoroughly spoilt on the garden front, growing up in beautifully cared for grounds that had once belonged to a botanist. We had a greenhouse with a grape vine and a peach tree, and every year my father would conjure up a huge crop of yellow tomatoes that are still the best I have ever tasted.

Gaining a garden again then, my first as an adult, feels like a green-fingered baptism of fire. Living things will be under my control. Weeds will take over if I do not keep militant order. The delicate flowers will need constant watering. Suddenly I have an insight into what it must be like to run the Scottish Labour Party.