The text from my brother-in-law was, it must be said, direct. “Tell Mum she is a murderer.” I relayed the message to my mother-in-law, sitting innocently with us in France underneath a large parasol. She was on holiday with us, after a stint watering my brother-in-law’s garden when he was away. She had been dutiful, but sadly had managed to overlook something known as the Shed Bed, which had gone into battle with the recent heatwave, and lost. Hence the grumpy text.
Mothers and sons, fair enough. But when you are talking tenants and landlords, the plant relationship is even more delicate. Landlords want their flats decorated with greenery. Tenants, too — until they have moved in. After that, anything goes. I have direct experience of this with my bijou Paris flat, which had gorgeous boxes of ivy swaying from the sill of each shutter-framed window, helping it to look as if it had come straight off the set of Jean de Florette. However, after I had rented it to a couple of corporate tenants, the arid boxes looked as if they had come straight off the set of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
The truth is that no matter how seemingly clever and professional your tenant is, he or she will still lack the necessary brain space to include flower watering as part of a weekly, or even monthly entry.
“My advice to landlords?” says Natalie Waugh, lettings manager at Cluttons’ Holland Park office in west London. “Don’t provide potted plants and hanging baskets. It may be a goodwill gesture that makes the flat look lovely, but tenants overlook everything apart from two things: paying rent and handing back the keys at the end of their tenancy.”
Ms Waugh is currently in delicate negotiations with a tenant who failed to notice that his rented house had a garden. “The whole thing was utterly neglected. Leaves and debris everywhere,” she says. “The plants all died. The trees are all overgrown,” she sighs. “We get this all the time. Tenants want to be babied. When presented with a contract stipulating their duties, they just sign it and reach for the keys. They never read it.”
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This sort of behaviour can have grim consequences. I didn’t have the energy to campaign on behalf of four window boxes in Paris, so when my plants were killed, I merely interred them in a communal bin.
Other landlords aren’t so relaxed, according to Amelia Greene, lettings manager at Cluttons’ Kensington branch. Clearly Cluttons has some sort of speciality in death-wish tenants as far as botany is concerned, because here was another gardening horror story.
“We had a gorgeous flat in Cranley Gardens, Kensington, which we rented out for £750 a week,” relates Ms Greene. “One of its chief attractions was a 300sq ft, east-facing, decked terrace that could be reached via sliding doors out of the master bedroom.” This terrace was clearly something of a party venue.
“It had everything. Lights, electricity, running water, furniture and gorgeous plants — a small olive tree, geraniums, nine box balls and nine lavender plants.”
Unfortunately for the tenant, the outdoor area also had a roof, necessitating a focused campaign of watering. Indeed, this was so crucial that the tenancy agreement even included a green-fingered clause, which Ms Greene thoughtfully sends me and which reads thus: “1.1. To keep the garden or terrace in the same condition as at the commencement of the tenancy, weed-free and in good order.”
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“The landlord had supplied a fact sheet telling the tenant exactly how to look after the plants,” adds Ms Greene. You can guess the rest. It was like my brother-in-law’s Shed Bed.
When the tenant checked out, the Cranley Gardens flat had acquired a deeply ironic address, since there were now nine dead box trees and nine dead lavender bushes. Ms Greene e-mailed me a pathetic selection of shots revealing their little withered leaves.
The tenant faces a bill of £1,600 — the cost of removing the dead plants and replacing them. His reaction? “He swore. A lot,” says Ms Greene. “It never occurred to him that he would be liable for the death of plants. But he understands he did wrong, and I suspect he will cough up.”
Watering plants appears to be the thin end of the tenancy wedge, as far as negligence is concerned. It seems nothing responsible can ever be expected of tenants. “They never read instruction manuals,” says Ms Greene.
“White goods, ovens, extractor fans, we leave instruction manuals, but tenants never read them and never fulfil even the smallest obligation, such as cleaning out a filter. Of course, this then leads to the machine breaking and a complaint.
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“Heating, air-conditioning, water controls. They all get them wrong,” continues Ms Greene. “We have perfectly intelligent people moving in, and then all of a sudden, they find they can’t do anything. Changing light bulbs is the most common request. We have had tenants asking if we could get a contractor out to change a light bulb.” It is truly astonishing. “You go on viewings with some of these people, and they can’t negotiate how to get out of the door. I think it is part of the psychological state of being a tenant rather than an owner.”
The pressure is on for the Cranley Gardens 18 to be renewed. “This is the best time of year to show off flats with outside space, and the landlord is concerned it gets sorted as fast as possible,” says Ms Greene.
Hasn’t he learnt his lesson? “Oh no, he must have plants on the terrace. But he is installing a £400 automatic watering system, so that the new tenant doesn’t even have to think.” That’s one less chore, then.