It is not a talent with which I have been blessed, my skills being more suited to the destruction of flora rather than the nurturing of it.

I have enjoyed modest success in ripping out unwanted shrubs and cutting down redundant trees although my achievements in the latter field have been marred by some unfortunate incidents which have left those close to me scarred physically and emotionally. As you may have guessed, the skill lies in knowing which way the tree will fall. Sadly, I've never quite been able to get the hang of it.

In describing flowers , I am reduced to a reliance on their physical characteristics. There are big red ones, small pink ones, pretty white ones and perfumed yellow ones. I can tell a rose from a rhododendron, the thorns on the former being a giveaway, but it ends there. I know some flowers prosper in shade and some in sunlight, but beyond this knowledge the world of blooms and blossoms is a lost land to me. The only thing I ever planted which did not die was a letterbox at the top of my parents' driveway, which hardly counts.

I regard those who can navigate their way confidently through a plant nursery with the same awe I reserve for those who can comprehend opera.

Thus the miniscule grassed courtyard at my fiancée's flat which she calls "the yard" is not what could be described as a horticultural wonder, falling somewhat short of the Royal Gardens at Kew in the breadth and depth of its splendour. The garden bed sports at its edges lots of Long Pointy Grass, although efforts to find such a species listed in botanical encyclopaedias have been unsuccessful. Perhaps it's called something else.

There is also a small patch of lilies which regularly shrivel and die and then, miraculously, are resurrected, and several shrubs. And at the moment there are some bindi-eye patches which are coming along nicely and come summer, should provide a fine crop of needle-pointed prickles.

Then came the hail storm of a few months back which ripped through her northern Sydney suburb with savage force, shredding her shrubs as it passed. I congratulated my fiancée on her foresight in not planting a garden and having it ravaged as if by a biblical locust plague, but the storm left the shrubs looking decidedly second-hand. The Long Pointy Grass, however, proved to be particularly resilient and continued to prosper.

Last weekend, the sad spectacle of hail-shredded brown leaves and flaccid dead and dying plants she had endured for the past few months became too much. Armed with a newly purchased pair of secateurs I attacked, hacking away at the deadwood like Premier Peter Beattie carrying out a Cabinet reshuffle.

Midway through this assault, the brown leaves began to turn a bright red. Unpractised in the wielding of secateurs, I had pruned a piece off my little finger as well as the shrubs and was now bleeding freely into the garden.

Blood loss aside, I felt a lot better for my labours and slept soundly that evening. Too soundly as it transpired, for when I woke up I shrieked, ran into Kassya's room and told her to dial 000, convinced I had suffered an internal haemorrhage in the night. The fresh white sheets were splattered with blood. I felt as if I was in a remake of The Godfather - Part I. When I finally ceased gasping in panic and my heart rate had dropped below five hundred beats a minute, I realised that the bandage on my finger had, in the course of my nocturnal thrashings, come adrift and the bedclothes now resembled the Japanese national flag.

I'd also managed to redecorate the doonah cover in red and daub the white wall behind the bed. It had been a very artistic, creative night if you were into human blood finger painting and I had slept through the entire experience.

Having pruned Kassya's garden to the point of extinction and losing a litre of blood in so doing, I am now committed to a spring-inspired renaissance. The courtyard, we have decided, will be a profusion of colour, a visual triumph which will uplift the spirit and delight the eye. Just how this will be achieved is unclear. I've considered hiring a landscape person but am fearful of the cost. We could wait for one of those television garden make-over programs to descend on us but I've made so many unkind comments about them in public conversation that they would probably dump a tonne of gravel over the fence and leave.