By the end of every week that I spend grubbing around in journalism, wading through the cesspit of corruption, foul play, squalid deals and sordid scandals in search of material, and then immersing myself in all this filth in order to write about it, what I very badly need come Saturdays and Sundays is to get my hands on some nice, clean dirt.

For me there's nothing so cleansing of the mind and soul as gardening. Gardening with a passion, that is. Not just a spot of pottering around with a few houseplants, but all the toil, soil, sweat and strain of hard-core horticulture.

I know, I know. Lots of people don't share my enthusiasm for getting down and dirty out in Malaysia's heat and humidity. What's more, they consider gardening a bore. A chore that any sensible citizen performs only under duress or out of dire necessity, or else pays some other poor sap to take care of.

Certainly that's the impression I get from the astonished stares of the neighbours and passers-by as I swelter out under the blazing sun in my seedy old workshirt, disintegrating jeans and battle-scarred construction boots, in a lather of grime and grunge. Some of them clearly think I'm gila; a candidate for Tanjung Rambutan, the Hospital Bahagia handiest to where I head for my gardening getaways, the house of my beloved parents-in-law in Ipoh.

Two days slaving away in the serene green there, though, is all the psychology I seem to need to rid myself of all the inane, insane and insanitary sludge I've been reading and writing about all week and restore myself to some semblance of sanity.

Plants, like all truly cultivated companions, are unfailingly sustaining to the spirits, soothing to the soul, and above all down-to-earth.

They don't chatter, gossip or make small talk, and they keep their opinions, convictions and prejudices, if any, to themselves. In fact they're blissfully silent, never making a sound above a whisper or a rustle.

Plants are admirably stoical, as well, never complaining of the pain however savagely I have to clip or prune them back into shape. And, beyond wilting a little when I've neglected to water them sufficiently, they're utterly undemanding of attention.

Many plants are most generous with their bounty, too, repaying the gardener's hard labour and constant nurturing - or even, if necessary, lack of any such input - with a wealth of foliage, flowers and fruits.

Jungle gym

But the garden's more than just a bunch of botany. It's also a haven and a heaven for a whole menagerie of zoological marvels, from birds and butterflies to lizards, frogs and spiders, not to mention the myriads of insects they feed on, or the millions of surviving flyers, creepers and crawlers that feed on me.

The odd bite or sting is a small price to pay, however, for membership in what I think of as my jungle gym. Equipped with all the weeds I could possibly need on which to work off my pent-up rage, stress and frustration, and affording unlimited scope for digging, hoeing, sawing, slashing and other activities that act as antidotes to every possible side-effect of the writer's sedentary lifestyle from muscular atrophy to cardiovascular catastrophe.

Gardening's not all hard going, however. Whenever I've worked up a thirst, which is pretty often some days, I've a great excuse for taking a beverage break and vegging-out for a spell in the shade. And whenever I feel either too lazy or utterly bushed for another burst of effort, I can always branch out to something a little less arduous, like taking a drive to a nearby nursery for a browse around the plants, pots, tools, insecticides and other related merchandise.

So you see that, as crazy about gardening as I am, and as deranged as I might appear to be getting out there to do it every weekend I possibly can, there's method in my madness.

You might well ask, of course, why I keep writing about the world's grubby goings-on when it takes so much dirty work to get the effects of it all out of my system. I guess it's partly because I feel there's more than enough escapism, triviality, feel-good fluff, false cheer and outright trash in the media already without my contributing more of such nonsense.

There's also far too little genuine news, at least as the great British newspaper baron, Lord Northcliffe, defined this precious commodity: "News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising."

In other words, as William Storey wrote in a statement of his aims for the Chicago Times, the newspaper he founded in 1861: "It is a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell."

Not just for the sake of raising hell, or for boosting circulation with sensationalism, but as Senator Don Chipp pithily explained many years ago when asked his motive for founding a new political party, the Australian Democrats: "To keep the bastards honest."

The press, at its best, serves as the peoples' and the politicians' conscience. Conscience being, as HL Mencken, that giant of American journalism and gadfly of the phoney and fraudulent slyly styled it, "the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking".

But the last word on the duty of the press to dig up dirt and expose it to the view of the voters, and on my consequent need for dirty weekends in the garden to recover from making my small contributions to this cause, has to go to the early 20th century US socialist and journalist James P Cannon: "Every good newspaper is muckraking to some degree. It's part of our job. Where there's muck we ought to rake it."