Authors: Margery Fish
Firmness in all aspects is a most important quality when gardening, not only in planting but in pruning, dividing and tying up. Plants are like babies, they know when an amateur is handling them. My plants knew, but I didn’t. Walter would not tolerate an unhealthy or badly grown plant and if he saw anything that wasn’t looking happy he pulled it up. Often I would go out and find a row of sick looking plants laid out like a lot of dead rats. It became some thing like a game. If I knew I had an ailing child I was trying to bring round I’d do my utmost to steer him away from that spot. It didn’t often work and now I realize that he was right in his contention that a plant that had begun to grow badly could never be made into a decent citizen and the only thing to do was to scrap it. Sweet Williams were my greatest trial until I learned to cheat. Mine had an awful way of becoming leggy and untidy, and instead of sitting up straight and sturdily they flopped about and lolled about in a way most unpleasing to my lord and master. I should have saved myself a lot of anguish if I had discovered earlier that a lot can be done by putting the unseemly legginess under the soil, and making it so firm that each spike is supported. I have even used this unorthodox treat ment for pinks that straggled, to make them temporarily presentable. Of course, the real answer is to grow and plant them properly.
Another thing I was taught was to get plants into the soil at the first possible moment. It really hurt my husband when people bought or were given plants and delayed planting them. Sometimes we’d see a border being remade and heaps of plants left lying about with their roots exposed to the air. It is so easy to cover the roots with sacks if one hasn’t time to heel them in, and it makes all the difference to the life of the plant.
Planting came first in our lives and whatever job was on hand it had to be abandoned if plants arrived. I remember one weekend when we had some rather special visitors, to whom we were showing the countryside. A parcel of flowering shrubs was delivered by the railway. The visitors just had to amuse themselves while we dealt with those shrubs. First we put their roots in a bucket of water while we dug the holes, then Walter planted them feverishly and I watered them copiously while our visitors looked on and thought we were slightly mad.
Sometimes, with the best intentions in the world, it isn’t possible to plant immediately, but one can always dig a hole and heel the plants in the earth, or with trees or shrubs that are too big to plant like that, one can see that the roots are covered with straw or sacking. I have given plants to people—and kind people at that— and seen those same plants weeks later huddled together in a corner just as I had taken them from my basket, without a crumb of soil or a handful of leaves. When I give away plants I like to pack them in damp moss so that they come to no harm if neglected. One can do that with a few small treasures but it takes too long when giving away large quantities, and the only thing to do is to choose the people to whom you give them.
One mistake nearly all beginners make is to plant too close together. I heard a lot about this when I first started gardening, jokes on the subject were read out to me, and I came to the conclusion that most humorists were male, because it was always the wife who made this silly mistake. It is extremely difficult to visualize how big your plants will grow, and it is quite natural to want to cover that expanse of bare earth as quickly as possible. In fact if you planted the things as far apart as they ought to be the effect would be very bare and bleak for a long time, but it is the only thing to do. Most people plant shrubs far too close together and the effect is com pletely ruined when they grow up. It is far, far better to plant them
at the right distances and fill the gaps in the early stages with temporary plantings. It is sometimes worth while to put in more shrubs than you will eventually want if quick results are needed. I did this with
Euphorbia Wulfenii
in a place where I wanted a quick screen. Three plants were put in fairly close together and I had my effect in the first year. The strongest of the three overlaid the other two, and I removed them. The beginnings of a garden need not be painfully bare if you plant less worthy subjects among your permanent collection.
It requires great faith to allow the right amount of space when planting, but when you do the results are surprising. Michaelmas daisies, as an example, if grown properly with individual shoots about a foot apart (half the height is the usual allowance) make themselves into fat bushy plants which are a joy to behold (and need a stout stake to uphold). Annuals should be thinned out ruthlessly and instead of spindly specimens those that are left will show you what can be done when a plant has adequate space in which to develop. I have seen a single plant of night-scented stock make a bush about eighteen inches square, not because of my strong mindedness, I fear, but owing to the fact that all its little brothers and sisters died in infancy and it was left alone.
When it came to staking I came to grief badly. In the first place I did not stake early enough, and quite a lot of handsome heads of flowers were condemned by my mentor because they were crooked by the time I did tie them up. Nothing will straighten a plant that has grown crooked. And when I did stake I was accused of doing it too loosely. My idea was to allow the plants to grow as naturally as I could so I put a few sticks at the outside of each clump and tied string—not too tightly—to the sticks. I admit it wasn’t satisfactory because the wind blew the flowers about mercilessly in my little enclosures and they got tangled and bent. I was warned that I must be more drastic but took no heed. So Walter taught me a lesson. He got stout stakes (mine were slight because I didn’t want them to show too much) and he drove them into the ground with a mallet. Then he took those poor unsuspecting flowers, put a rope round their necks and tied them so tightly to the stake that they looked throttled. He put into the action all the exasperation he felt at a pigheaded woman who just would not learn. I did learn then, because I knew what would happen to my poor flowers if my staking was sloppy. I never achieved the perfection that was preached to me, that is, a stick for each stem, but I was more generous with sticks and I made an elaborate cage of string between them so that the flowers had little play. Most people use twigs or peasticks for their staking and it is quite successful in ordinary soil, but I never succeeded because I couldn’t get the rough sticks sufficiently deep into my heavy clay, and they were never firm. I could use a mallet with straight sticks, and though it made more work, it was the only thing to do.
There are, of course, other good ways of supporting one’s flowers. In a very big border, full of big plants, coarse netting stretched over posts gives magnificent support. For individual plants there are excellent wire circles that are placed flat on the ground over the plant and raised on upright supports as it develops. With
this method the plant starts right and gives no trouble at all, but it is not very easy to use these supports on very big clumps without a lot of wasteful overlapping.
Now I use metal supports in the form of a half circle with long prongs that are pushed into the ground. I copied the idea from a friend and got the local blacksmith to make them for me in all weights, sizes and heights. To preserve them and to make them less conspicuous I have painted them dark green. Sometimes I use two to make a complete circle, or one with string tied behind it. In large plantings half a dozen or more can be used at different angles and for supporting plants along a wall they are ideal, as the flowers hang over slightly in a natural way. I make a practice of putting them in very early, pushing them in a long way to begin with, and pulling them up as the stalks grow taller. When one lot of plants have finished blooming and no longer need support I lift out the wires and put them in to help the next lot of plants that are coming on.
There are people who will not admit the necessity for tying up their plants, and their gardens are always a depressing sight. There is only one way to avoid staking and that is to grow only plants that never need any artificial support—but what a lot of lovely things would be missed if one did that.
Walter had one garden adage he was always quoting at me: ‘It is nice to take a walk in the garden and better still if you take a hoe with you.’ I think a pair of secateurs would be my choice.
How often one sees odd bits of dead wood, suckers and overhanging branches as well as deadheads on one’s morning amble. That timely snip saves a lot of time and trouble, and one can collect a few flowers for the house at the same time.
Deadheading is a most important part of gardening. It isn’t only from the point of tidiness that one should remove spent flowers. A plant will go on flowering over much longer periods if every dead bloom is removed at once. Kept in a state of frustrated motherhood it will go on producing flowers in the hope of being allowed to set seed and thus reproduce itself. I often get three flowerings on Canterbury Bells by persistent deadheading, and I even deadhead my naturalized daffodils so that they do not deteriorate. I have some old swords and I keep one sharpened for this job. One can slash off a lot of heads in a very short time.
My friends are not so keen on this habit of mine, it deprives them of all the exciting seeds they would like. The only plants I allow to come to maturity are those which I want to increase, such as primulas and cyclamen, willow gentian, blue poppies and incarvillea.
Walter was never tired of telling me about a certain great garden, whose noble owner boasted that no dead flower would ever be found therein—a wonderful standard which we’d all like to copy. I often wondered how many gardeners were employed in that garden, and if there were many beds of violas in it.
We used to have great arguments about this deadheading job. Walter used to go round with a pair of secateurs in his hand and snip off his dead roses, but he never picked them up. I complained that I wasn’t the fifth gardener and it wasn’t my job to go round clearing up after him. But I always did because I couldn’t bear to see the beds
littered with dead flowers. In the end it became a family joke and he took great delight in telling me when various parts of the garden needed the attentions of the fifth gardener. He pruned roses in the same way and, when I protested, always explained that the important thing was to get the pruning done and the little matter of collecting the prunings could be done at any time—but never by him!
I think a good many gardeners would have better gardens if they used secateurs more. Most plants respond to quite severe cutting down. Aubrietia, for instance, should be cut right down to the ground the moment it shows signs of getting brown and leggy. It responds magnificently to this treatment and is very soon covered with a new crop of tight green leaves, and before you know where you are is flowering a second time. Some people take shears to their aubrieta but I think secateurs make a better job as they cut closer.
Rock roses, too, should be cut back when they get straggly, dead parts of rock phlox should be cut out, and such things as saponaria and dianthus need drastic cutting. Yellow alyssum can be made to live up to its name ‘compactum’ if everything is cut away after flowering. One wouldn’t think that the plant would be satisfied with a few stumps of stems, and looks maimed for life, but in a surprisingly short time it covers itself with neat young leaves. If it is not cut like this the stalks get long and top heavy and break off at the joint.
Nepeta is a plant that repays regular trimming. As soon as the first flowering is looking a little tired I cut off all the blooms and, working from underneath, remove all the old stems. The plant starts again from the centre and sends out new sprays of filmy blue flowers. The only time when one should not be drastic with nepeta is in the late autumn. When the final trimming takes place it is important to leave an inch or two of stalk above the crown. If you cut right down to ground level corpses and not plants will greet your sorrowing eyes in the spring.
Irises should be trimmed after they have finished flowering. Some people seem to think that this is a mistake. The experts agree that the right procedure is to cut the leaves to about six inches after flowering. Later on there will be dead outer leaves to be pulled off so that no dead vegetation lies about on the ground to harbour slugs and snails and other creatures.
Iris stylosa
needs drastic grooming. Not only should the foliage be drastically trimmed after flowering but all the brown leaves should be pulled out. I get no pleasure from seeing the flowers peering at me through a tangle of dead leaves, like an old man’s blue eyes twinkling through eyebrows as thick as thatch.
Iris stylosa
gets very thick, and very untidy, if it is happy. It doesn’t like being lifted and divided, in fact it sulks for a couple of years after such treat ment, but if all the dead stuff is pulled away quite a bit of the plant comes too and in this way it can be kept to reasonable proportions, and will flower better too. Some of the best
Iris stylosa
I know grow in a Devonshire garden where the foliage receives very firm handling, so firm, in fact, that the flowers always grow well above what is left of their foliage, and look extremely attractive that way.
Some people are unnecessarily sentimental when cutting down their plants. Everything about the plant may be dead except for perhaps one bloom, which isn’t quite. They will leave that one bloom, lonely and depressed, goodness knows why because it doesn’t look at all nice. It is far better to sacrifice the flower and make a proper job of cutting down the plant.