If you want to reach the heights in the world of gardening, you’ll need a ladder.
I have seven. I don’t know why I have so many. One’s enough to reach the highest point of my house when it needs painting so what, I ask myself, are the other six for?
They were bargain from garage sales and I couldn’t resist buying them; their wooden rungs and flared legs in cedar and oregon, unpainted, bar one in a rich orange (orange=easy to find when left propped up somewhere in the orchard).
I can’t climb more than one at a time so I’ve fixed a couple of them to poles and grown vines up them: Manchurian gooseberries and grapes, unorthodox but very Greek (the Greeks didn’t do this, I suspect, but in my imagination …).
My smallest is a mini-fruit picker’s ladder, perhaps for dwarf trees. It’s far wider at the base than the top making it very stable. Not that it would be far to fall if it did tip, but it’s un-climbable now, nailed as it is to the shed wall and tightly wound about with a thick kiwifruit vine. Perhaps ladders represent my aspirations; I’ve lots of those too. They’ve made great playthings for my children as they grew up. I once looked out of the upstairs window into the face of my son who had climbed to the top of the tallest ladder, straight up into the air with his younger brother standing at the base holding it vertical and steady.
I use the ladder to check the bird nests in the cabbage trees, take aerial photos of my garden, clear the guttering of leaves and to collect seeds from high up in the canopy of my native forest.
The greatest bonus of all for a collector of ladders like me is to be able to say yes to a neighbour who might want to borrow one, even if I’ve lent out two earlier in the day.
2 comments:
In that case you probably can't have too many ladders! My neighbour has very inconveniently gone on holiday and locked his single ladder in his garage just when I'm needing one ;-)
And it's no bad thing to have a collection of keys as well :-)
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