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This week, Avondhu reporter Ellen Lynch, tells us what she ‘hates’ about gardening.

I love my garden. It's the work I hate. Well not hate, exactly. Some chores I quite enjoy. I find weeding quite therapeutic. Doing battle with the entrenched roots of some sturdy specimens is quite invigorating, I find. Plus it's a harmless way to channel aggression. No-one ever got locked up (that I know of) for killing weeds.

Whenever I'm at home and my mobile rings, I sally forth into the garden to take the call. After all, you only need one hand to hold the phone, so I like to have my other one usefully employed while I'm catching up with family or making plans with friends. By the time I'd finished my weekly chat with my elderly aunt the other night I had, unknownst to myself, cleared the entire stretch from the garden gate to the garage of weeds. When she started in to telling me all who'd died recently in my home town I began over on the other side, knowing I was good for another half hour.

My father was a great gardener. He was happiest in the garden, tending his vegetables and flowers. He came from the country and our small garden in the estate in town must have seemed very confining to him but boy did he make every inch count.

We had every kind of vegetable and dozens of different varieties of flower. Anything he planted grew. My sister inherited his green fingers. Mine has been a rather more hit-and-miss experience. Some things I've planted have thrived, others withered away as if in disdain at my paltry efforts. 'Grow here? In this soil? With no sun? Are you kidding me?' they seem to say as they curl up and die before my eyes. Trial and error it has been and I've plenty of bare patches to prove it.

It hasn't always been my fault. We had a dog called, for obvious reasons and because no-one could think of a better name for him, Brown Dog. He had a habit of cocking his leg at every shrub in the garden. I don't know what that animal was ingesting but half of all our greenery remained lush while the other half, the part he peed on, was skeletal.

My worm-phobia doesn't help my gardening efforts. I loathe all creepy-crawlies. Seeing one slither near me as I dig is enough to send me indoors shrieking. I get round this problem by inveigling one or other family member to dig the holes or turn over the soil or do whatever task might run the risk of me coming into contact with them. So, I suppose, you could call me a fair weather gardener.

Two years ago, at a garden fete, my sister (her of the green fingers) and I bought identical clematis plants. We discussed where we were going to sow them in our respective gardens. She poo-poohed my idea of planting mine underneath the oil tank, so that it would grow up and its beautiful blooms disguise the ugly tank underneath.

It'd never grow there, she told me. Hers was going on a sunny back wall of her garden, beside the patio. All the better to admire on a summer's evening while sipping wine and barbecuing with friends. Imagine my delight, my punching-the-air guffawing triumphalism when, for once, just once, mine grew and hers withered.

Not only has my grown, it has thrived in its cool, shady, hard-scrabble spot by the shed, as if taking seriously its responsibility to grow up and cover the ugly tank. So much so that I've had to prune it a few times now, to let the oil man in to fill it. It blooms in May and I can never resist the urge to go out and stand smugly admiring it.

I love flowers and have planted loads over the years but never in any organised fashion. Whether that's an innate rebellion against order or a healthy sign that I'm OCD free, I don't know, but I've always been wary of those people who cut their grass to billiard-table closeness, trim their edges to razor sharp precision or organise their flowers by type and colour.

I allow my pansies consort with my peonies, my dahlias to fraternise with my dianthus and my begonias to share a bed with my bluebells. Not so much the reluctant gardener maybe, more the recalcitrant one.

Truth be told, I have more success in growing things than my disorganised methods deserve. My haphazard planting, last November, later than was right and done hastily in the ad breaks of a documentary I was engrossed in on television, of dozens of daffodils and narcissus rewarded me with the most beautiful show for a good three weeks in the spring, a sight that never failed to cheer me up every time I drove in and out of the driveway.

Similarly with the crocuses, even though, not having planted them deep enough, they were pecked at by birds. And, most wonderful of all, the hyacinths I planted last year for one reason only - they were a favourite of my father's - against the odds, popped up and grew into robust, beautifully scented plants that reminded me of him. Not too bad, eh Dad? I'd think, smiling, each time I passed them.

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