Go get yourself some gardener’s hands.
There once was a time when the brown creases and the unapologetically hard-working look of a gardener’s hand, replete with gardening nicks and scrapes, sunspots and manicurelessness would have been considered a little, er, unkempt.
But wait. Isn’t it wonderful to spend a whole Saturday or a Sunday poking around places that more manicured indexes cannot reach?
Smelling the loam after a shower and shaking clumps of soil out of a bunch of carrots. You made those carrots. You and the powers that be.
That’s quite something.
What’s also quite something, is waking up one morning to find a long trail of leaves with velvety yellow flowers draped over the garden wall. You could swear that wasn’t there yesterday. You’d be so right.
It pops up almost overnight like Jack’s beanstalk.
And, as a light breeze picks up, a leaf lifts to show you your first butternut winking at you in the morning sun.
Not the kind of first butternut that comes in sterilised jars with a picture on its label of a baby with a curl in the middle of his forehead. No. Your actual first butternut.
All because someone threw the pips out after dinner and they landed with their feet in the ground. It happened just like that.
Not only that, but sometimes there are those days in the garden, or whatever patch of soil is your gardening spot.
Days you will miss if your hands have never got out there and stuck in. Mornings when an entire nation of white butterflies come out, and rain down on you like a confetti shower. You’ll feel like you’re in a snow dome. A snow dome in your own veggie patch.
Go get yourself some gardener’s hands, and let manicures be last season’s big thing.
