"HARRY! Harry!" Throughout my childhood and beyond - as recently as last weekend, in fact - I have witnessed my mum standing and calling for my dad.

For dinner, for tea, to come to the phone, or simply to sit with her in the sun with a newspaper - the reasons she regularly needs to reel him in are many and varied.

But he can never be found. Why? Because he is always in the garden. He is always fussing about outside, trimming hedges, pruning climbers, mowing lawns and verges, and generally getting his hands (and boots) dirty.

I never really sympathised with my mum, until now. "I thought the idea of a garden was to sit in it," I said to her. She laughed.

Two months has passed since we acquired our strip of greenery and during that time my husband and I have sat in it for enjoyment's sake for all of ten minutes. His fault, not mine.

I know that gardening can be a time-consuming activity, but he has become truly obsessed. He treats the garden like a huge DIY project, a dawn to dusk affair, that sees him disappear towards the compost heap or behind the shed as soon as he gets home from work, never to appear again until - in the same way as my mother - I am forced to yell at the top of my voice for him to come in. I've become a garden widow.

It is ridiculous. It's not as if we live in Chatsworth. Yet when challenged, the reasons as to why he needs to spend so may hours messing about with grass cuttings and hose pipes trip off his tongue. It seems that something always needs doing.

The worst of it is that I can't even sit and relax in the garden on my own. The couple of times I've tried he's been mowing or cutting hedges in such close proximity that I might as well have been reclining in a deck chair on a roundabout on the ring road.

For every outside job that gets done, there's an inside job that is being neglected. So, while our hedges are now certain to scoop the Privet The Of Year award, we have nowhere to hang coats, no shelves for our books, no curtains in our bedroom (not that anything goes on in there that might embarrass the neighbours) and dodgy plumbing to the washing machine.

I could always tackle these things myself, but my chemical make-up doesn't lend itself to power tools.

Gardening programmes must take some of the blame, shovelling all these hints and tips in our faces, listing seasonal jobs that must be done within a certain time.

My idea of gardening is to float about in the late evening sun wearing a floral dress and straw hat, waving a watering can around and pruning the odd rose with a pair of secateurs. But, as people keep telling me, "keeping on top of it is a full-time job".

Things can only get worse. In autumn my husband wants to turn a corner of our garden into a vegetable patch. I will never see him.

A couple of months to save our marriage. Does anyone know a decent block paver?

Updated: 09:39 Tuesday, July 27, 2004