People getting too old to manage their gardens employing somebody even older to do it for them

Long gone are those elderly flat-capped local swains with names like Seth and Reuben who used to stand in kitchen doorways touching their forelocks as they hand in trugs of runner beans and say “ Your purple spouting be mucklin’ along nicely, M’lady” .  They have been superseded by a younger generation of  landscape artists who are a trendy flying squad of contractors in white vans which serves as a mobile tool sheds . Besides which gardening has never been easier thanks to garden centres where whole low-maintenance landscapes can be bought and installed from scratch in a day . Here plants are displayed in alphabetical order just as one would expect to plant them out and everything is in Homebase greens and ‘Groundforce’ browns – colours which  don’t exist in nature,  the most resplendent displays on the site being  the racks of seeds packets. The day of the lazy gardener has come and traditional garden features such as earth and grass can be dispensed with altogether in favour of low-maintenance concrete slabs, woodchip and tree bark ‘topsoils’,  and any amount of sundials , gnomes , and figurines of Greek Goddesses . Meanwhile  mail order companies  are retailing gardening  aids which nobody would dream of being caught buying over a counter – like weeding-stools and spongy strap-on kneepads – to keep the old people doing their gardens themselves to the bitter end .  You might as well have asked why it is that all the broadcasters who give experts advice on gardening programmes seem to have horticultural names like Greendew and Meadowsweet . Had this quot been “Nobody who actually does their own  garden ever gets time just to sit in it “ (Thelma Grope, Sawston) it might  have scored a higher rating  

(Todd Shrub , Hitchen) - Q****