Apostrophes. Sometimes you find them in the strangest places.
Our copy of the Harrod horticultural catalogue arrived in this morning’s post, and I was soon lost in vivid descriptions and colour photos of such wonders as walk-in fruit cages, wooden obelisks and long-handled forks.
This catalogue is a daydreamer’s delight. It’s educational, too. If it teaches you nothing else, at least it’ll prove whether you’re an optimist or not — and it looks as if we are; after all, we don’t do much gardening at the best of times, and yet even in the middle of winter, when the slugs have all turned to ice cubes and the ground is as hard as a fishwife’s stare, we can still fantasise about what we might do outdoors this coming summer. (Most likely, it’ll be our three usual gardening jobs — mowing, weeding and grumbling.)
We might even treat ourselves to a pair of Swiss army secateurs. The tagline on one Felco ad — ”most professional’s favoured brand of tool” — caught my eye first: it’s probably not most professionals’ preferred choice of where to put an apostrophe. Having said that, a good pair of secateurs will do a much better job when it comes to pruning (or even to chopping of bacon into small pieces in readiness for the occasional omelette, for that matter) so we’ll just have to overlook that apostrophical howler for now and concentrate on choosing the best tools for this year’s gardening jobs. Unfortunately, secateurs remain fairly low on my list. The number one garden tool this year, I predict, will be a hammock! Gotta go now. If anyone wants me, I ‘ll be in the garden having a snooze.