Following the huge success of my recent, ‘Have I told you about my medical problems?’ blob, I’ve decided to go for another one of those topics that old people like me force you to listen to in post office queues. Today I’m going to discuss ‘gardening’. Whoa, hold on there! Before you run screaming from the room, I’m not talking about that, ‘It’s been a busy day, Marj. Before my breath gave out I planted three of those pansies over by the ornamental Chinese good luck bridge’. And I’m certainly not talking about the, (…to Joey the budgie) ‘Look darling, mummy’s sprained her little finger pruning the primroses.’ No, sir. Them lot are all wimps. Ten minutes hard labour with a fork and they’re bushed. I could arm wrestle the average gardener with both hands tied behind my back.

No, I’m talking about… Extreme Gardening.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, Extreme Gardening, let me explain. It’s a little like regular gardening but it takes place in a totally unsuitable location. A bit like a silver service crystal-glass dinner on a bamboo raft on the high sea. My first exposure to EG was in Chiang Mai some twenty years ago. Before that, I’d never been anywhere long enough to put down roots. (That was the first of a succession of very annoying gardening puns you’re going to have to put up with in this blob. Sorry.) I found myself renting a large cheap house on the Ping River. I have no idea why but I got it into my head to dig up all the concrete in the back yard and turn it into a riverside oasis. I bought a lot of gardening equipment and spent every weekend in my garden wearing nothing but boots, lilac Speedos and zinc nose cream. Once I’d dug up the concrete I had little choice but to turn it into a rockery. It was about eight feet tall but had numerous crooks and nannies into which I could insert shrubs and ornaments. The rockery became a feature of the house. Barely a weekend went by when I wasn’t approached by this or that Sherpa asking if I’d open it for rock-climbing groups.

Then, one morning, I wiped the sleepy dust from my eyes, splashed to the window to look at my rockery, and it was gone. Gone? A great pile of concrete? Gone? In fact, the whole garden was in absentia. In fact, that knee high water I’d waded through to get to the kitchen wasn’t just some evil hangover joke. The little Ping River had grown up overnight and taken my garden – because it could.

It took me a while to get over that. But, I guess I just couldn’t leaf well alone. Three years ago, Jess and I moved to a lump of land on the Gulf of Siam to a place called Lang Suan which ironically translates as; Behind the Garden (acacia were wondering). Every night, lulled to sleep by the gently hushing surf on the beach. Tall coconut trees swaying in the breeze like slow-motion one-legged hula dancers. And, despite the neighbours’ mocking laughter, I set about turning our cow paddock into a tropical paradise. Heard this before? Well, Chiang Mai was Eden compared to Lang Suan.

The Thai Tourism Authority would have you believe there are two seasons in Thailand; the cooling gently sprinkling rainy season and the warm but not unpleasant hot season. These are the same people currently attempting to tell the world that Bangkok’s a great shopping venue. In fact, there are four seasons here on the Gulf. We have the ‘bake everything to its charred remains season’, the ‘flood everything season’, the ‘Greatest Hits of the other three seasons, season’, and, my personal favourite; ‘the Monsoon season’. The latter lashes us from October through to January with such ferocity that our house is five meters further from the ocean than when we built it. Coconuts pelt you at 100 mph. It’s not unusual to see the odd neighbour flying through the air at the end of a rope tied to a cow. This is followed by a sudden lull from February to April during which the temperatures reach 86 degrees centigrade and I’m out there with my ice pack giving artificial respiration to the frangipanis. All the plants gather around the house for shade. We let the more delicate ones sleep inside. That’s when you find out who your ferns are. Then come the rains in May. ‘Looks like it might rain, Jess’, you say, mainly because you’ve just spent three hours watering. Then you look up and smile as the first droplets sizzle onto the hot earth. Then you sit under the balcony roof with a cold beer and the dogs and you watch. And you watch. And three months later it stops. August and September could be any one of the three other seasons or a combination of the lot. It’s not unknown to be blown over, sunburnt and washed away all on the same day. But somewhere in there is a cold season when it gets so chilly you have to wear shorts that reach your knees.

I have lost two entire gardens since we arrived here. One sat under water holding its breath for a week until it realized the water level wasn’t going down. For a while I was pruning in scuba gear. A lot of cutting remarks during that rainy season, I can till you. The other garden left me this January. It was taken by the ocean which breached our humble defences one day and carried everything that wasn’t nailed down way beyond our house to a new home in the bogs out back. It left so much salt behind we looked like a Vermont ski lodge. But I am an Extreme Gardener and our motto is, Leave No Bougainvillea Behind. I’m not taking no sh*t from no Mother… Nature. I’ve filled the land. I’ve built a wall. I have machine gun turrets. I’ve made little cocktail umbrellas to get the team through the hot season. I’ve planted stuff with roots so deep my mate Gary in Sydney swears they keep him awake at night. I came back from wrotting my book and I was straight out there, dedicating my life to getting my boys through this next campaign. I’ve got blisters in places a man didn’t even warrant having places. I am burnt ragged and riddled with canker and suffering from verticillium wilt. So don’t you give me that…‘Oooh, look Bert, he’s gardening. What a pansy.’ I suppose I could sycamore convivial spot but this is vine with me. If you want to see what a real man does in his garden, take a look at http://picasaweb.google.com/colincot. It’s okay. I took the dirty stuff off.