You read a lot these days about the legions of people who go regularly to gymnasiums or health centres to "work out". Meaning doing exercises on or with the help of various contraptions such as rowing machines, or tramping along a moving treadmill; then there's a stepper, on which you go through the motions of mounting stairs, but there's no staircase, just a yoke under you. And you have weights, and a device that mimes skiiing."Working out?" many may say. "You could do all that if you take on housework." Gardeners may claim, too, that now spring is nearly on us there is plenty of working out to be done, and that the air is better than in any old sweaty gym.
Better too, if you have even a minute garden than flatfooting it around the pavements of the city, known as jogging. Thus, on a sunny morning, a gardener was busy cutting back her mallows. Cutting back to the solid stem. Why? "Well, do you want your flowers to come out about ten feet up?" And mallow now includes several handsome varieties apart from the old pale purple we all know. It calls for some reaching up, stretching, but not too much. Bending to lift away the cut branches, enough to make you slightly breathless, and thus fill your lungs. Healthy.Then there is still some raking of leaves to be done. Mostly of oak, and it's remarkable how the leaves insert themselves among the hedges and into flower beds and cause you to stoop and reach out and haul in the load. How many muscles are you using? You learn not to bend over all the time, rather crouch often; easier on the back. Then lifting the heaps of leaves onto a tarpaulin or something similar to bring to the compost dump.That's only the exercise part of it. The real value is in what you grow. "A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot" wrote one Thomas Edward Brown in the last century. Can anyone finish the few lines that follow? He also gave us in the same poem "Not God in gardens when the eve is cool?/Nay, but I have a sign;/'Tis very sure God walks in mine". Well.Gardens may not be only for flowers and shrubs and trees - if there is space - but also for some vegetables, or fruit and, above all, herbs, that element which adds so much to food, not merely in flavour but, with its oils and its vinegars and salt, pepper, mustard perhaps, in nourishment. A last thought: try to buy loose rubber tops to put on canes that hold up some of your flowers. It's so easy to forget in stooping, and you could lose an eye as you bend down.Y