The one where my father-in-law was not invited for Christmas

It is not often I will use Friends as a cultural touchstone, although I am very much of that generation, but there were fables in those storylines, morals in the endings, and psychological truths hidden amongst the froth.

The bit that sticks so burr-like in my mind, is the one with the list. Not that Ross made the list of all the reasons why he shouldn’t date Rachel and he should date someone else, I accept that people do daft and hurtful things, but Rachel’s response to finding it.

Ross: Rach, come on, look, I know how you must feel.

Rachel: (near tears) No, you don't, Ross. Imagine the worst things you think about yourself. Now, how would you feel if the one person that you trusted the most in the world not only thinks them too, but actually uses them as reasons not to be with you.

Ok, ignore the context, and focus on the principle. My husband is not leaving me for someone with skinnier ankles, but we have disinvited my father-in-law from this season’s festivities.

Now, for starters, my father-in-law came to gardening late. He gave up sailing and took up women, and if you are going to date in your seventies, in Cornwall, you are going to spend much of your time in National Trust tea rooms, and walking around National Trust gardens. And so when he moved to a stone bungalow on the outskirts of a Cornish town, and it came with a little back garden, he went all in. By which I mean, he talked endlessly about FYM, as if it was code for a trade secret, and sent me photographs of neon yellow dahlias. For a while, he saw me as a gardening guru. He would ring every few months and ask to be invited up to ‘view the grounds’, and to ‘have the tour’.

My husband’s family never say anything in a straightforward manner, and we slowly got messages via three other extended aunts, cousins, brothers, that he was expressing sadness that I had ‘let things go’. Not that my ankles had got chubby, although I confess I would also have been rather crushed if he’d mentioned that, but that the garden was a mess.

Some of this is simply a matter of perspective. When I let some nettles grow long for the butterflies, he asked if I would like a strimmer for my birthday. He asked me when I was going to prune my tumbling roses. He sighed at my top-dressed beds in February and asked where my dahlias had gone.

And so when he said that he would like to come for Christmas (his latest adventure in love has ended in tears, and his invite to share that particular lady’s turkey had been rescinded), my stress levels went up a few notches. It’s December. It’s wet. We’ve just had a deep deep frost that knocked off the last of the nasturtiums, and the floods have turned a lot of the grassier areas to bogs. (Note to self to plant flag irises there next year.) None of us are looking our best right now.  

Against all my polite English inclinations, my husband told him straight that his critical eye was not a happy addition to the festive feast, and he could make other arrangements. His father’s response was to recall his idea of the heyday of the garden, the day we go married in it. If I haven’t previously mentioned, we got married in August, and the hard landscaping was barely set, so everything looked immaculate.

Given that I don’t want an immaculate garden, the biosphere, the wildlife, the soil, and the birds don’t want an immaculate garden, it is surprising that this grates so much, like Rachel and the list. Secretly, very very deep down, I know there is a tension between what people want to think of as a garden, a gardened garden, an insta-worthy, all year round, always blooming garden, and how I believe we should engage with nature.

I know this, but it is incredibly hard to hold this line when there is judgement. Whispered judgement at that.

I know that this judgement is having an impact in other places too. My husband keeps saying that he is going to ‘put the garden to bed’. He is absolutely not a gardener, although he considers Monty Don to be the preacher of the gospel, so I am taking this to mean that he is going to get the long oak table that sits in the middle of the orchard under cover to protect it from the wet, and maybe rake up some leaves. But it gives me a clue that the garden that he sees through his eyes has been coloured by his father; that leaves on the grass, self-sown herbs and flowers (ok, and grass) in the hoggin, piles of dead wood for the beetles and the frogs, are something to be ashamed of.

I have been feeling this shame too, however much I didn’t want to. But writing this has re-activated my belief and my zeal. The revolution is messy and belongs more to the leaving alone than it does the imposing of order. The magic is in the compost heap, not in the garden centre bedding plants. Malus Farm is an entity with a soul, with me as part of it, not with me in control of it. It is not for me to polish her up and disturb her rest to please some who would probably suggest that I should be sectioned for saying that my garden has a soul. He may be of my family, but he is not of my tribe.  

Someone has dropped out of our large family Christmas, so there is a space at the table for my father-in-law. I know it would be a sign of faith in this new gardening age, this light touch with nature, to invite him and be impervious to his patriarchal beliefs. He is simply a product of his time, and he doesn’t know any better.

I have not yet decided if I am ready to be the better person, but I am absolutely going to assume that you are not like him and that you are more like me, and share some pictures of the garden in all its wet, slumbering beauty.

These are going to act as the ‘before’ shots to the big re-design of 2024. No, we are not going for neat, but we are going for chard-growing efficiency, extra sweet pea space (I am going huge on sweet pea growing next year), and paths I can get a wheelbarrow down.  

And if I have one more wish for 2024, it is that we keep the faith. The revolution is coming. The revolution is here, and the nettles are welcome.