One day I hope to make a horticultural living, it’s a seedy ambition I’ll admit. I once thought that love, music, and gardening were above an hourly price, and that to confess a desire to do them for cash would be like admitting ‘one day I hope to make a living from my favourite daughter’. How could I sully something so beautiful and pure just to put bread in my mouth and beer in my belly? Well I’m thirsty and hungry and I don’t care anymore. I’ve sold my soul to the Great Green God and the high priests of BTECH and I want my earthly rewards.
So I’ve started thinking about my career, and as part of my investigations into Making a Fortune and Getting Away With It I have come across a curious breed of people, the Pro-gardener. Pro-gardeners are tough hard-hitting male workers who don’t do gardens – they do jobs. If every statement you hear starts with: ‘I didn’t get where I am today by….’, you can bet you have strayed into conversation with a pro-gardener. ‘I didn’t get where I am today by walking around with my shoe laces untied’ ‘I didn’t get where I am today by wasting time eating vegetables’ ‘I didn’t get where I am today by twatting about on the internet’. Well Mr Alan Garden Sugar neither did I, they’re just things I like to do on the journey.
Pro-gardeners have a universal collective delusion that they are not horticultural workers, but mercenary bionic soldiers from the future. They swap notes and stories on X-K-8000 loppers and Slash-Master 3000 lawn mowers. They talk about kill ratios, conquests and terraforming alien ecosystems with massive muscle bound JCB diggers. The pro-gardener is an unfathomable and scary beast, and the main weapon in their arsenal is that some of them actually make money (almost unknown in the horticultural sector), but listen closely I have discovered a chink in their steel toe-capped armour! Their one natural enemy, a group whose mere mention will drive them to beetroot-faced strops and howls of snotty nosed derision. The jobbing gardener.
The jobbing gardener and the pro-gardener are locked in eternal combat, both service the same area and both are self-employed. The pro has the kit, the jobber has the price, the pro has a sign written van (something like ‘Ace 1 Gardens 4U – Be The Best’), the jobber has a bicycle and a rucksack full of jam sandwiches. But it is not competition that stokes the pro-gardeners antipathy – it is shame. The jobber reminds the pro of the horrible secret lurking behind their apparent success. The secret that its not very hard to mow a lawn, anyone can do it, all you have to do is walk in straight line.
Being of Orwellian mind I naturally sympathise with the jobber. These are the plongeurs of the gardening world. Downtrodden toilers who refuse to dignify humiliating labour by ascending the slippery golden ladder of success. To expand, to invest, to take out insurance and buy a decent pair of shears, all these things would be to admit defeat to the world and its salary driven norms. It is for the jobber that the Jolly Gardeners pubs of England are named, hard working men with no ambition beyond finishing a hot days toil and having a frothy pint of ale, and certainly no mind to go home and draw up a marketing plan. However being a hip young urbanite I have all manner of successful friends to keep up with, all sorts of expensive vices to indulge and a heavy London rent to pay – things that all whisper to me of a fleet of shiny silver BensGarden 4U vans, packed with well oiled Extermatron 900 strimmers and micro chipped smart trousers; after all I won’t get where I’m going by sitting in the sunshine drinking tea.
So here I teeter, like a young Anakin Skywalker battling with my conscience and the temptations of the Dark Side. A solution must found and something must be done. I invite reader contributions into how to strike gold in the world of horticulture without turning into a tosspot. Any winning answers will be entitled to either a 10% share of my future profits or a flagon of foaming ale (which at the moment look like being roughly equivalent in value).



























