Ballad of two barrows

2 days ago , by Richard Lutz

Richard Lutz initiates a changing of the guard

Eighteen years ago, I was walking down Harbour Road and saw an old knackered beat up dented deadbeat wheelbarrow dumped in a waste skip ready for oblivion. I wanted it for the house we were busy re-doing.

There, on the left, a pile of rusted junk that has been my faithful builder’s mate, slave and loyal wheelbarrow for 18 years. And on the right, its replacement, another wreck, this one equally old and banged up, at one time lilac-coloured, now second or third hand and ready for another summer under the hot (sic) Scottish sun, labouring in the garden.

I came across the Old One in ‘08 while walking down Harbour Road. I saw a skip (aka a dumpster) piled high with debris. And just peeking out was a pair of wheelbarrow handlebars.

Now, at that precise time I needed a wheelbarrow for a house we were re-doing. So, I clambered into the skip and there she lay: it had a flat tyre, a body so rusty you could see all the way through to the New Year and a pair of handles that were so squint that the wheelbarrow would break the laws of physics to travel in a straight line.

But it did the job- tons of earth, brick, driveway stone and garden detritus have been carted to and fro and, vitally, it did valiant service as a racing car for little kids.

Sadly, eighteen years of graft has taken its toll. The rust ate at its ancient frame, old cement couldn’t be chipped from the body, the eternally flat tyre plain refused to come off its bracket- it had been bolted to the forks by a careless blob of concrete.

I needed a replacement. And that’s when I found out a new wheelbarrow now costs £60 ($80 or 145 Mongolian Tugrik). That’s alot of money to spend to careen around a garden with cement, dirt and kids. I hesitated.

And I’m glad I did.

Something in the back of what remains of my brain said go to the dump. And there was an old piece of junk, with that faded lilac colour, just as banged up as my metal one. But its tyre was rock solid, its frame taut, not shuggly, and its mottled plastic bucket even slightly larger than the 65 litres of my ancient metal MarkOne model.

They now sit side by side as I figure out how to transfer the Old Boy upwards to The Great Compost Heap in the Sky and move forward with its substitute coming off the bench.

And this brings us nicely to what is actually happening in my Garden of Sisyphus, the garden of unending labours. Behind the old barrows, the white blooms of the pyracanthas are in fine form. As are the white blooms from the nearby climbing hydrangea.

But the wildflowers, sown in the borders, have yet to appear despite a week of a heatwave. The marigold bedding plants are tough enough to survive coastal winds and my ruthless slaughter of the hebe and cistus bushes didn’t prove fatal but seemed to invigorate them after a wet winter.

But one item that always thrives- much to my chagrin and aching shoulders- is my eight foot tall privet hedge which seems to grow the instant the cutback has stopped.

Its green wall of leaves isn’t the most alluring sight in the living world. But they’re decorated by vertical bands of yellow and gold wild hop vines. I try to avoid chopping them back in my fortnightly butchery of the hedge.

Sometimes I succeed and that means I’m left with a jaunty pattern of zigzag stripes bordering my rambling pocket of earth.

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