no glove lost

When I think of garden gloves, I see a cobwebby garage with a bunch of old junk in it. Paint cans, flat soccer balls, bike tires. And in a dusky corner, on a peg, there’s the glove--the one I haven’t lost--dirt-stiff, all twisted up, with a spider living in the thumb.

The truth is, that glove is somewhere in my garage, but the peg is fiction. I’m not that organized. I think you have to be to wear garden gloves. But since it’s fall again--time to whack back, tie up, plant and mulch the garden beds-- I’m faced with the old debate: gloves or no gloves?

Sensible people, people I trust, are putting them on, or planning to. “In theory I wear them,” says my friend Steve Gunther, a photographer who owns a whopping 16 pairs. “Whenever I go to Home Depot, I come back with more,” he confesses. “Then I throw them down and lose some till I’m lucky enough to find one right and one left.” This will change, he swears. “I’m too tired of the pain.”

OK, so you don’t have to be organized. It’s a matter of stabbing yourself repeatedly on rose thorns and pruning enough to draw blood and raise calluses that no one but another gardener would touch. Or maybe you simply need a good scare.

Katherine Glascock, a Studio City landscape designer, reluctantly tells me horror stories about gardeners who landed in hospitals when bacteria seeped into their weeding or pruning cuts. “You never know what’s out there-- in the soil, in the air,” she murmurs, in the sort of tone that always comforts me. An ally. Someone who comprehends the enormous danger of being alive.

But this is eased, of course, by the bliss of plunging into earth hands first, nurturing new growth and vanquishing weeds. Take my dad, a fearless plantsman in his 70s. He has never owned garden gloves. I remember him in his robust 30s, attacking pyracantha barehanded and wrestling bougainvillea to the ground. “If you have to bleed to get it right, so be it,” he told me recently. “It’s a question of touch.” And Bob Denman, another horticultural vet, who owns Placentia-based Denman & Co., purveyor of garden tools, seconds the point. Though he dons gloves for many garden jobs, he works the soil without them. “You’ve got to feel the dirt,” he explains, adding with a chuckle,”That’s why some people garden naked.”

For more modest types, Denman sells the gloves he gardens in--a light kidskin work glove, an elbow-high rose gauntlet, a sheepskin roper and a latex-coated cotton glove with a knit cuff, all made by Little’s Good Gloves, a century-old company in Johnstown, N.Y. Some of them come with snaps, so right and left stay together when stored, and the kid “Work-Lite” is nearly as supple as your own skin. What’s more, some styles come in extra-small, which is great for me, since otherwise I’d have a half-inch of empty fingertip.

Less encouraging is the news that I need four pairs of garden gloves--one for mowing, raking and clipping, one for thorn-handling, one for brick-laying and rock-picking and one for watering. “Everyone wants one glove that does it all,” Denman says. “There isn’t one.”

You can, though, make a few pairs go a long way with proper care, he says. For example, dry leather gloves flat and out of the sun, wear them while they’re still damp and rub them with neat’s-foot oil, and they won’t curl up and die like mine did.

But really, oil my gloves? Next, I’ll be waking at dawn to mix my own plant food. The fact is, my hands have never been my best feature and I rarely challenge my bougainvillea. And I’d still have to remember to snap a snap. So for now, at least, I’m going to say goodbye with the gardener’s universal handshake: warm and firm but very rough around the edges.