Gardener’s Question Time does me a power of good. It comes on just after Sunday lunch and as soon as Eric Robson has introduced the panel I’m away. The weather forecast wakes me up in time for the last question and I’m then ready for whatever the world has to throw at me, such as my tea.

I should add that my tendency to drop off is my fault not theirs, and if anyone has any doubts about whether this is an entertaining programme, I’d recommend that they go to see one of the shows being recorded. The panel move about the country; a year or two back I saw a show being recorded in Windermere and tonight it was our turn, in Grange-over-Sands. The strength of the programme is that it’s not scripted; in fact the panellists don’t get to see the questions in advance, so everyone has to live on their wits. Which they do, splendidly. Tonight Eric Robson was in the chair and Anne Swithinbank, Matthew Biggs and Bob Flowerdew were there to answer the questions. Anne Swithinbank has a way of illustrating what she’s saying with flamboyant gestures and took no notice of Eric Robson’s pleading eyes which said “We’re on the radio dear”. She’s also a mind reader as she recommended Tithonia (quite an unusual choice) on the very day that I’d marked it to buy in my seed catalogue. Bob Flowerdew is very close to being batty, but he gives his answers with such wit and panache that nobody minds. Eric Robson and Matt Biggs are as sharp as newly honed secateurs and in fact there’s more humour in one edition of this radio show than in a whole series of Gardener’s World under the lugubrious charge of Monty Don. The audience tonight was too busy laughing for anyone to snatch 40 winks, even me.

“Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

As I arrived home last night an owl flew in front of my headlights, which pleased me mightily, not simply because owls are magnificent creatures but because the presence of an owl means the absence of mice.

Mice are insidious pests in the garden, the more annoying because the damage they do is below the surface of the soil, so you aren’t aware of it until it’s too late.  They like to nibble at roots and bulbs.  Two or three generations ago every gardener kept enough strychnine and arsenic in the potting shed to keep mice at bay and Poirot busy for a lifetime, but poisons wouldn’t do in the kitchen garden.  What would?  One idea was to use the device pictured above, which shows a brick being suspended by a piece a string, which the mouse nibbles through, whereupon the brick falls and squashes it.  This was described in Gardening Illustrated as “the most simple, inexpensive, and surest mouse-catcher ever invented”*.  On the same page in the magazine is a letter from a reader in which he tells of the fun to be had hunting slugs, which are baited with piles of bran:  ”My sporting time is early morning (before breakfast) and evening, and I cut the slugs in two with a knife.  I can safely say that with twopennyworth of bran, dotted down on my rockery, I have killed considerably over 1,000 in a few days, and still they come, only much smaller in size”.

*Gardening Illustrated October 11th, 1879

On 15th March 1879, William Robinson shook up the gardening press by launching a new weekly paper, priced at 1 penny and aimed fairly and squarely at the amateur gardener.  He called the paper “Gardening Illustrated” and seven months later he was boasting: “Our weekly issue is now larger than that of the whole of the horticultural press of the United Kingdom combined”. Of course, in the days before circulation figures were published, there was no evidence for this assertion and it was hotly contested by his rivals.

Gardening Illustrated was launched during the craze for subtropical gardening, which Robinson himself had done so much to promote with his book, “The Subtropical Garden.”  But the public were beginning to realise that exotic plants don’t always survive in our climate and one of the early articles dealt with the problem of what to do with the trunks of dead tree ferns.  Nowadays most people would throw them away but the Victorians had more imaginative ideas.  Robinson recommended using the trunks to display ferns, with a large fern such as a Nephrolepsis or a Lomaria gibba (now known as a Blechnum gibbum) placed in a hole scooped out of the top, with smaller ferns stuck into the trunk along the side.

This is a problem very close to my heart, and I suspect, thousands of others, after last winter.  The photo above shows my tree ferns looking splendid after the first snowfall of winter, but the prolonged cold finished them off, so I was left with 6 lifeless stems. My solution, suggested to me by Mike Tullis of Inglefield Plants (himself the latest in a long line of Victorians), was to decorate the stem with Fascicularia bicolor.   I think it looks good.  All I need to do now is scoop out the top and insert a large fern for that William Robinson look.

]]> http://www.slow-life.co.uk/2012/01/18/dead-tree-ferns/feed/ 0 http://www.slow-life.co.uk/2012/01/13/the-moss-gardens-of-the-lake-district/ http://www.slow-life.co.uk/2012/01/13/the-moss-gardens-of-the-lake-district/#comments Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:54:28 +0000 jonathandenby http://www.slow-life.co.uk/?p=2511

As we drove through the Lake District, my Japanese friend was particularly taken by the dry stone walls which bounded every field. He was also impressed by the rich colour of the moss which is growing spectacularly in this warm, wet, winter covering every shaded surface. Sometimes the dry stone walls would, themselves, be covered in moss, creating a vivid verdant sculpture. This is how the moss would have looked at Koke-dera (see -http://www.slow-life.co.uk/2011/12/24/the-moss-temple-garden-koke-dera-is-this-the-best-garden-in-the-world/) if we hadn’t visited it in the dry season. The Lakeland moss seems to have an extra dimension as it climbs up the trees as well as covering the ground. Because it’s everywhere we take it for granted, but the truth is we have a thousand Koke-dera’s right here on our doorstep – there really was no need for me to travel 6,000 miles to see a moss garden.

When I was fresh out of university and even more naive than I am now I came across a family called Elliot who published a series of books known as “Elliot’s Right Way” books, each written by a different expert in their field. They covered dozens of topics, from driving to bridge to gardening. I was amazed to find that the names of the experts were made up and that each and every one of the books were written by Elliot himself or one of his two sons. They were massively popular and earned a fortune for the Elliot family.

It was a similar story with Mrs Beeton, author of the famous cookbook. Her husband was a publisher and he got his wife, who couldn’t cook to save her life, to pretend to be an expert and together they cobbled together a cookbook relying entirely on the expertise of others. Lots of howlers crept in, such as advice to cook carrots for 1 3/4 to 2 1/4 hours. Mr Beeton went on to produce a gardening manual under his wife’s name, which was ridiculed in the gardening magazines.

The Beeton story came to mind today when I read that Jamie Oliver has been named as one of the country’s most influential gardeners*. Now, there are two things we can say with certainty about Jamie Oliver. The first is that he can cook (unlike Mrs Beeton). The second is that he’s no gardener. He’s been named as an influential gardener because the DIY store, Homebase, have employed him as their new face. It happens that I’m a regular at Homebase (see - http://www.slow-life.co.uk/2011/11/11/over-wintering-cannas/) and I’ve seen ‘Jamie Oliver’ branded plants on sale there. I thought they were poor quality and over-priced, and I’ve got a feeling that that view was shared by others, as they featured prominently in the half-price “bargain corner”, looking rather worse for wear.

Influential Jamie Oliver may be, but it’s a poor sort of influence if the product is as bogus as the name of the author on an “Elliot Right Way” book.

*The Telegraph, “Meet Britain’s Most Influential Gardeners“, by Tim Richardson.

You don’t expect to see much flower power in a Japanese garden at any time of year and so to come across a rose garden in full bloom in the middle of winter was quite something. I found this lovely surprise at the Fukuoka Botanical Garden, which is set high above the city in the Minami-koen park. The display consisted of several dozen varieties of floribunda and hybrid tea roses, all in full flower and in perfect condition. It gets as cold in Fukuoka in winter as it does in England and they had snow here yesterday, so conditions are hardly ideal. Mind you, should I be so surprised, after being taken aback by the quality of the roses which were supplied to my garden at the Gardening World Cup here in October. The Japanese love their roses, and they certainly know how to grow them.

The roses shown are R. Meigronuri “Gold Bunny” and R Meiridge “Charleston”.

The monks may not be as unworldly as they seem. They’ve created a mystique around the moss garden which surrounds the Temple of Fragrance in Kyoto by making all visitors apply for a permit in writing at least a week in advance and then charging a fee (or ‘donation’ as they put it) of a whopping £25 (3,000 yen) a head. The going rate for a temple and garden in Kyoto is £4. I reckon they rake in a cool £4m a year.

But the monks temper their greed with a sense of fun for once they’ve extracted your chunk of cash they take you to a hall where they make you sit on the floor in front of a low desk together with about a hundred others, school room style. You are then treated to a 20 minute Shinto ceremony after which you’re instructed to write a prayer on a wooden tablet using a calligraphy brush and black ink. You then queue to kneel at a shrine on which you place your prayer, before you are allowed to look at the garden.

The garden is important because it’s nearly eight centuries old. It was designed by Muso Kokushi, a zen priest, as a place for meditation. The monks have done well in keeping the coach parties away because it retains its peacefulness. We were told that there are 120 types of moss in the garden, which, like the Eskimo’s 145 kinds of snow, doesn’t merit further enquiry. We were also told that the garden looks its best in June, in the rain, when the moss lies under a thick canopy of trees. Now, in December, when the trees have lost their leaves and the ground is dry, it doesn’t have that touch of magic. This may be the most expensive garden to see, but it’s definitely not the best.

A blow torch with a 14 inch flame (the Tarantella) is the next best thing to a flame thrower (see – http://www.slow-life.co.uk/2011/12/17/boys-own-gardening-part-one/), but if one of those isn’t at hand to get rid of the weeds, how about a dose of sulphuric acid? As even Bart Simpson knows, the trick with sulphuric acid is to add it to water, never the other way round. If water is added to the acid, heat is generated with the result that steam and acid shoot into the air, with horrible results if they hit your face. Acid is also liable to destroy clothing and metal objects, not least watering cans. In other words sulphuric acid is worthy of a place alongside dynamite and blow lamps in the panoply of the Boy’s Own Gardening kit.

The wonderful properties of sulphuric acid in controlling weeds were explained in a lecture to the RHS by Professor P.E. Blackburn from Oxford University*. The Prof acknowledged that it could be dangerous, but pointed out that it was widely used in agriculture and there had been few casualties. He said that it was particularly effective with crops of onions and leeks, whose waxy leaves allows them to survive when the weeds were killed. For some reason acid is frowned upon nowadays. Bring on the blow torch.

*Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, Volume 73, 1948.

Is it any wonder that men (by which I mean grown up boys) confine their gardening to the lawn nowadays?

There’s no doubt about it, gardening was more fun in the old days. You didn’t just venture out with a spade or a trowel; if the mood took you, you could use a stick of dynamite or a blow torch instead. The dynamite was used to prepare beds for cultivating as an alternative to double-digging, or for removing tree stumps or for making a hole in which to plant a tree. Trials were carried out under the auspices of the Royal Horticultural Society which showed that explosives placed 18 inches apart and 3 feet deep would prepare the soil more effectively than traditional digging methods.

Even more fun could be had with a blow torch. There were two types – the Aetna, which produced a 9 inch flame and the Tarantella which gave a 14 inch flame. The main purpose of the blow lamp was to kill off weeds but they were also used against garden pests such as the turnip fly and woolly aphids, and the most fun was had by going out at night and zapping slugs and snails.

This is how it was summed up in a lecture to the RHS by Herbert E. Durham Sc.D.,M.B., B.C., F.R.C.S.:

“Notwithstanding the addition of explosives and blow-lamps to our gardening apparatus, I think that you will probably agree with me that we have not yet arrived at a sort of horticultural millennium when all deep cultivation will be done with explosives, when the surface weeding will be done with a blow-lamp and specimens of the spade and fork become some of the most valued antiques in a museum of the Royal Horticultural Society”.*

*Journal of the RHS, Volume 40

“The result is a feeling of ideal content, the mind remains self-possessed, but there is an intoxicating orgy of glorious visions in which are seen the most marvellous colour effects”

The RHS say that it’s popular with Mexicans and Native American Indians and that it has the alternative names of Muscale Buttons and the Whisky Plant. A quick check on Wikipedia reveals that it’s perfectly legal and that it inspired Ken Kesey to write his novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” – as he said – “it was after choking down eight of the little cactus plants that I wrote the first three pages”. Life in the potting shed may never be the same again.

And just in case anyone from the RHS should read this and reach for their lawyer, the quotation above comes from Volume 33, page 457 of the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society.