Authors: Margery Fish
We Made a Garden (8 page)
When dealing with delphiniums and lupins it depends on how cleverly planting has been done whether they are cut right down or only half way. If something else is growing up in front and will soon be in flower the best thing is to cut them down to the ground. In this way a second lot of growth and another crop of flowers will usually be produced. But if there is nothing in front to hide the massacre the best thing is to cut off the flower spikes but leave the foliage for a time to make a nice green bush, but there will be no second blooming.
Like everything else in the garden, deadheading can be done well or badly. With things such as Shasta daisies and heleniums it will be observed that there are side shoots, which will in time produce more flowers, so the stem should be cut off just above the new shoot. Some plants throw up fresh shoots if the old ones are removed from the base directly they have finished flowering. Most erigerons have this happy habit, particularly Mesa Grande, Quakeress and Azureus, so instead of just snipping off the dead blooms get down on your knees and make a proper job of it.
Roses can be pruned at the same time as the flowers are cut. Whether cutting for the house or removing dead heads the procedure is the same, make a sharp, slanting cut just above the first new shoot. There are two very definite schools of thought about rose pruning. The hard school prunes very drastically and there isn’t much left of the bushes after they have been pruned in the spring, but it does produce wonderful new growth. The other idea is not to prune at all in the ordinary sense, merely trimming off dead wood. The roses do not make so much new growth, but that will not matter if you have got your bushes the size you want.
Judicious cutting can make quite a difference to the look of a border. With a very large group of, say, Michaelmas daisies, it is not at all a bad idea to cut half the group down to six inches in May. This will mean two flowerings, because the cutting will delay flowering several weeks, and after the first lot have bloomed there will be a second lot to take their place. It is usual to cut the flowers in front, and let them come up to take the place of the ones at the back. If there are a lot of tall heleniums in a border half of them can be cut, and the rest left to flower naturally. Very tall Michaelmas daisies mean a lot of staking, but cut down to six inches in their youth they will never be a problem.
It is very easy to get colours badly mixed, and then the secateurs should be used to cut off the blooms that are clashing. Shrubs that are growing unevenly should be shaped, and plants that are bent or crooked should have the offending limbs removed.
Yes, a pair of secateurs is always useful and I envy men their pockets, they can always have a pair tucked away somewhere.
Watering was another garden job on which Walter had very strong views. Nothing annoyed him more than to hear that overworked bromide ‘You can’t start watering unless you go on doing it every day’. His theory was that people who have to go on doing it every day don’t water properly. They give a pleasant little sprinkle which damps the ground and makes it smell delicious, without even beginning to get down to the roots of the plants, in fact it tempts the roots to come up to the surface to get a drink, and they get burnt up unless that little sprinkle is repeated every day. If you scratch the ground after a so-called watering you will usually find that the water has hardly penetrated below the surface.
Walter’s way of watering was thorough in the extreme. He had lengths of hose with which he could reach every part of the garden, and it took him several days to do the job as he thought it should be done. This, of course, was in the days when one was allowed to use a hose and there was no restriction on watering from main supply.
A sprinkler was permissible on the lawn, but for the borders Walter liked to use a strong jet of water which he directed to the root of every single plant in the borders, and directed it for several minutes.
I can see him now on a hot summer day in an old panama hat and short sleeved shirt, with a tussore waistcoat which he wore for gardening and summer golf (to hide his braces, he always said he hadn’t the figure for a belt!). He would stand all day directing the life-giving water to the thirsting plants, with brief intervals for meals. He always maintained that a thorough watering like that would keep everything going for at least a couple of weeks, and he was quite right.
Another theory he repudiated was that one must not water in the sunshine. His reply to that was that it was better to water in sunshine than not at all, because it was obviously impossible to water as he did in the brief evening hours. He was very careful not to direct the water to the flowers and foliage, always aiming at the roots.
I had one complaint about this wholesale watering business and that was that it always brought our persistent clay up to the surface and the next day the top of the beds was solid clay, which baked to iron hardness in the hot sun. I always told him that he invariably chose the moment to water just after I had been round the garden forking up the soil to as fine a tilth as I could achieve. His usual reply was to ask me if I wanted everything in the garden to die of thirst. So, of course, after every great watering I was down on my knees again hammering away at the lumps of clay to break them down and allow air to percolate into the soil. The real disaster was if we had to go away before I had had a chance to get round the garden.
Since the war we have not been allowed to use a hose in the garden, as there always seems to be a water shortage in the summer. Keeping the soil well hoed all the time helps as it allows the dew to get to the roots. Another way of helping your plants to get through a spell of very hot weather is to mulch them. Some people find sawdust satisfactory, manure is good for some things, but grass cuttings are good for everybody. A thin sprinkling of grass will not get very hot but if you are putting on the cuttings with a liberal hand they should be left until all the heat is out of them before being spread round your pet plants. You have only to feel the heat generated in a heap of fresh grass cuttings to visualize what will happen if fresh cuttings are thickly piled round sensitive plants.
Such things as raspberries and phlox, which have roots near the surface, dry out very quickly and are most grateful for a comforting blanket of moist grass. Runner beans get a mulch of about a foot deep. It would be a big job to give runner beans enough water to satisfy them, but by syringeing their leaves and giving a generous mulch to their feet they do very well.
I’d like to mulch the whole garden but as that is impossible I concentrate on the plants that I hope will go on flowering the whole summer. Roses come first, and as I have mostly polyantha type, I do expect them to keep me in colour all through the season. Clematises, if doing well, have a large family to support, so I take good care of them, and remembering the needs of dahlias, I look after them too, but there are only one or two left in the garden, which have survived, in spite of my callous way of leaving them in the ground.
Of all the mulching materials I think grass and manure are the best because they get dug into the soil and continue to do good.
In addition to roses and clematis Walter had a deep passion for dahlias, the bigger, the brighter and the fleshier the better.
He bought a large collection from an expert almost as soon as we bought the house, and the first summer they enjoyed a secluded season in front of the hedge that separated us from the next house. There was no other place then in which to grow them, and I thought it was an admirable permanent home for them, a position all to themselves, with a hedge as background, but Walter felt they were being slighted by being put in the background and when I came to plant my terraced garden I was told to leave plenty of large spaces for the dahlias.
Unfortunately they were never labelled, so I had no idea what colours they were. Walter said they were all so lovely that it didn’t matter. I held other views but was not clever enough to evolve a way of labelling them. I did try but in the process of lifting the tubers, washing the tubers, drying the tubers, dusting with sulphur the tubers and finally burying the tubers in boxes of ashes the chance of any label remaining attached to the tubers was very remote. The consequence was that I got great blobs of the wrong colour in my carefully planned schemes, which did not endear them to me. They were the most flashy collection of dahlias I have seen, only fit for a circus, as I often told my husband.
When we first started gardening I was only allowed to watch (for future reference) the great ritual of planting dahlias. I think I was permitted to get barrowloads of manure and cans of water, but he would not trust me to do more. In after years, when he could not do the heavy jobs, I had to plant them but he always stood by to see I didn’t cheat.
Stock Exchange holidays—the 1st of May and 1st of November— were our aim for the ceremonies of planting and lifting the dahlias.
First of all Walter dug a large and deep hole. He never worried about treading on my plants, or smothering them with the great piles of earth that were thrown up, so I had to be careful not to plant anything within a wide radius. A generous spoonful of manure went into the bottom of the hole, and this was covered with soil. The next job was to ram in an enormous stake which was eventually to support the luxuriant growth of the plant, and then the tuber was lowered reverently into the hole and snuggled up to the stake to make things as easy as possible in after life.
A little ‘fancy’ soil (I mean for this good compost or a nice potting mixture) was sifted in all round the tuber and then some, but not all, of the earth dug out was put back. Instead of a nice smooth finish there had to be saucer like hollows to catch the moisture that would come from heaven or the watering can. It was no good for me to tell him that it looked as if the cat had been busy, it didn’t matter what my bed looked like so long as each dahlia was given all the comfort that was humanly possible. When he had finished I used to go round removing the surplus earth that was heaped up all round each planting, but I never dared shovel it back into his hollows, as I wanted to do. Some things were sacred.
Watering the dahlias was one of the things I was supposed to do and often shirked. If ever Walter saw me with a can in my hand, giving refreshment to some little stranger, or preparatory to sowing seeds, I knew I should hear ‘Are you going to water the dahlias?’ I am afraid I got in the habit of doing my watering when he wasn’t about. I wouldn’t have minded if a small amount of water would have sufficed. Nothing less than a whole canful had to be poured slowly down each horrible little hole—and the contents of one can would bring new life to quite a lot of my small treasures.
Sometimes even the stoutest stake would prove a broken reed and casualties brought gloom into the house. Nowadays, thank goodness, one seldom sees those tall fleshy dahlias, with blooms like soup plates, so heavy that they can hardly hold up their heads. I am glad that the present taste is for less tall, less exuberant dahlias, which are easier to grow and far easier to incorporate into an ordinary garden with pleasant effect.
The problem has been solved for me because I was never very successful in keeping tubers through the winter. Unlike the cottagers, whose favourite place for storing them is in the spare bedroom, I have only outhouses and they are all cold and draughty places. Under the staging of a greenhouse is a good place, but I have no greenhouse, and however carefully I stored them, tucking them up in mountains of straw, the cold always managed to find them and every season there were a few less, until I was reduced to two very ordinary red ones, a double and a single, and these I leave in the ground. They come up year after year and I am quite glad to see them.
As a gardener I was a great trial to my husband and I marvel now that he was so patient with me. He wanted me to concentrate on the straightforward things like delphiniums and lupins instead of odd things which he thought were not so rewarding. He had little interest in small, unshowy plants that I liked to try, and liked a good return for his money. The only way I could get round this was to keep up the fiction that I did not buy plants and anything new that appeared in the garden had been given to me. It wasn’t that he minded the cost, but he took the line that as I did not look after properly the plants that I had (i.e. didn’t water the dahlias enough) it was silly to keep getting more plants.
Every gardener knows the fascination of the unknown, and when the ordinary plants are doing nicely there is a great temptation to be a little more venturesome. That is one of the excitements of gardening, but one which my husband did not share. He pretended not to see me with my nose in catalogues night after night, and though I always tried to intercept the postman when I was expecting plants, he always knew.
On the whole I agreed with him that it was silly to try to make things grow that obviously don’t like you, certainly not if your soil is wrong for them. But there are some plants that are naturally capricious and unpredictable and it becomes a personal challenge to succeed with them. One such plant is Scotch creeper, or
Tropaeolum speciosum
, to give it its proper name. I knew it could be grown in this part of the world because for several of my friends it ramped away without restraint. But it just wouldn’t grow for me, though I tried it in a dozen different places, giving it everything I thought it liked. I planted it on the north side of walls and hedges, so that it could worm its way to the sun, and took endless trouble digging large holes for its reception, and filling them with a mixture of good soil and peat. Sometimes it put its head out to see if it liked the world, decided it didn’t and settled down to sulk. Very often it
didn’t bother to send up a single leaf. Only once did it respond to my overtures but, alas, it had the temerity to choose for its support one of Walter’s cherished rambler roses, and the moment when it was ready to open its vivid scarlet blossoms coincided with Walter’s decision to cut down the rose, and my creeper went with it. Though I continue to struggle never again have I had so much co-operation. There are two places where it comes up most years, although sometimes it will quite happily miss a year or two. It does some times achieve a few very meagre flowers at the end of the season, but obviously has no heart in it. The place where it does best now is on a bank facing east, in heavy clay. There is a large double gorse bush growing there and it does make an attempt to climb to the top of the bush, but not with any outstanding success.