Rhodendrons And Me

Ah, rhododendrons.

"There is a place for rhododendrons", as I said to a gardener friend who was showing off a poly tunnel full of them, all ready for planting, "And it's called Nepal".

If they were pretty then I might actually like them. I mean, at least himalayan balsam has a lovely purple flower and smells nice. But no, they're just a drab olive green over a bare brown soil, kept bare by a combination of them shading out the light and poisoning the ground for anything else that might try to grow there. The sods.

Anyway, rhodos and me go back a long way, from playing in rhodo-infested woodland as a kid - pretending we were in 'nam - to carving tunnels through them as an adult. This was the magnum opus of a friend of mine who, over the course of at least a decade, carved out a labyrinth of tunnels with hand tools in a few acres of rhododendron forest in the Purbecks. This was a quite serious piece of work, apparently the largest labyrinth in Europe although kept secret to a select few for obvious reasons. During the summer there would be parties in there, where we would carry crates of beer and cider across the adjoining heath and get hammered around a campfire in the traditional west country manner. The very last time I went, a few of us were leaving early (about midnight) and, as the sounds of the party died away behind us, we could clearly hear our friend's band playing at a completely separate party in an adjoining field. Naturally, we had to pay a visit...

At one point, the labyrinth, as it was known to those that knew, was under threat of development and expeditions were undertaken to scout for potential replacements. All you needed was some woods quite far from any buildings and infested with rhododendron and these were not hard to find. The usual deal was that we would all pile into someone's car, park somewhere nearby, walk to the woodlands and then hack our way around it with bill hooks and machetes. We were in the process of doing this when one of our number called out 'aaah... can we go back to the car now?' and emerged out of the brush with his finger bleeding at the knuckle and hanging off at a not very healthy angle. To my knowledge, that was the only injury that occurred in all these years of guerrilla gardening. Well, apart from a certain incident involving a lot of cider, a slightly worse-for-wear old punk and a billhook that I shall draw a veil over.

Roll on another decade and here I am, in those same woods, attacking those same rhodo bushes with a chainsaw. Our goal - or the forestry commission's goal at any rate - is complete eradication of rhodedendron, which involves myself and a few others chomping our way through the woods with chainsaws cutting it where ever it grows and allowing the ground layer of the woods to spring forth into full and rich abundance.

Great for biodiversity, not so great for a bunch of goths trying to build their own private party venue. Not that I'll imagine they'd be that upset, most of us grew up to be eco-warriors anyway.