Reflecting on the Diary’s decade

Press, 25 September 1987, Page 16

Reflecting on the Diary’s decade

Ten years of writing a gardening column! Strange but true. People say it is a sign of advancing age when events of 10 years ago seem as close as yesterday. Well, I am not yet ready to admit to middle age and I am more than a decade away from retiring age, but I would have to admit that it doesn’t feel like 10 years since this column began. Time has flitted. Oops, that was your life! Actually, I am not sure without looking at the files on microfilm that it is exactly 10 years, but it was some time late in 1977 when my first gardening notes appeared. The “Gardener’s diary” symbol was devised later. It happened because my colleague, Mike Lusty, had a holiday. I filled in for him for a few weeks, writing a column that was different from his, and readers apparently liked it. . When Mike’s holiday ended, his column resumed, but mine didn’t stop. I am still producing a gardening column every week, and still trying to find something new to say every week. It isn’t as

easy as it sounds, but in all that time my column has failed to appear only twice — once when there was a strike and once when my copy disappeared somewhere in the system. Yes, that does happen, despite or because of computers. Readers who have information stored in computers will sympathise. In the beginning, about the end of 1977, I was making a new garden, and I saw a chance for my progress with the garden and the gardening column to run in tandem. I had been reading a lot of the best British writing on the subject — let’s face it, the Chinese may be the world’s best food growers but the British have, by and large, the best ornamental gardens. Books about plants and gardens by people like Gussie Bowles, Arthur Johnstone, Euan Cox, and Edward Hyams are classics of their kind, from both horticultural and literary points of view. They were knowledgeable people — Bowles, for example, was chairman of the Royal Horticulture Society’s scientific committee for many years.

The late Patrick Synge, who was the R.H.S. editor, recounted a story of a visit he and a friend made to Bowles' garden at Myddelton House, near the New River. After viewing the garden and collecting baskets of plants to take home, they were invited into the house for tea. Bowles showed them into a washroom to tidy up. When they came out, he asked, “Did you see the moss growing in a crack in the pan? I am so excited about it — it is a very rare British species.” I don’t carry my plantsmanship to such extremes. Before we sent our old outside bog away on the back of a Landrover for the convenience of our pony club it had honeysuckle and a tea rose growing in through the door, but I never saw any moss-in it, rare or otherwise.

I do admire, though, the writing style of these British writers: succinct, witty, eminently readable, and packed with information. They make you interested in their subject. More recently, people like Christopher Lloyd and Beth Chatto have carried on the tradition.

I would have to admit that my approach to gardening has been influenced by these writers, although in my own writing I have tried to achieve a distinctively New Zealand flavour.

Back in 1977, I thought it was needed. There just wasn’t any good writing about plants in New Zealand newspapers and periodicals. Most of our publications were still in the “Adam the gardener”, era. Mike Lusty, who had succeeded Charlie Challenger as "The Press” gardening correspondent some years earlier, was one of the exceptions (as was Charlie) in that his column contained a great deal of practical information, drawn from his own experience. Over the years we have, I think, built up a very successful Mutt and Jeff relationship through our two columns, which appear side by side. Mike, the practical man, looks after the nuts and bolts, as it were, of gardening, while I flit about doing the fancy bits. Charlie, incidentally, is now retired from Lincoln College and running a small nursery at Little River, where he grows alpine plants very well indeed.

I am not foolish enough to claim that my own prose style makes the earth move. But I do try to make my columns readable. And accessible. And accurate. And, I must add, first hand.

Most of the information disseminated by garden-

ing writers is second or third-hand, cribbed from, the writings of other people, and in this way a lot of disinformation has been spread. It is a newspaper legend that “The Press” once had a gardening correspondent who owned a little garden shop in. Cashel Street, near the Bridge of Remembrance. He was getting on in years and wasn’t as energetic as he had once been, and his method of z writirig a column was to recycle clippings of the notes which had been printed two years previously. The company went on for years paying him for this paste-up service, why, I don’t know; it could just as easily have had someone on the staff do the pasting up, and had the copy free. Perhaps that says something about what our periodicals were like 25 years ago. Well, I thought the public deserved something better than that.

I wanted to produce a column that was readable, and might appeal to a wider readership than conventional gardening notes. I also wanted a column that was founded on my own experience with plants so that any observations I might make, while not necessarily informed ones, would at least be original. I wanted to avoid cliches. And above all, I wanted to avoid recycling misleading information. I began to make a conscious effort to keep up with the latest publica-

I&ARDENER’Sj! W DIARY

Derrick Rooney

tions and research, and began to assemble a collection of such reference books as I could afford, so that any technical information I gave readers on the identification and distribution of plants was as accurate as it could be. As for the cultivation of plan, I quickly learned that it was best to rely on my own experience, and I determined quite early, after making a couple of terrible blunders, that I would write only about plants that I was familiar

with from my own garden, or from the gardens of friends. Books and nurserymen, I soon learned, could not be relied on to provide accurate information about the requirements of individual plants; after all, plants, like people, vary in their needs. Methods that work in one garden do not necessarily work in another.

Here is an example: Crinodendron patagua, a small tree from Chile. Most gardeners are familiar with Crinodendron hookerianum, a shrub from the fringes of the Chilean rain forest with spectacular lanternshaped coral-red flowers, one which thrives in a cool, humid, mossy climate such as is obtained in Cornwall in Britain or in Southland and the West Coast in New Zealand.

In Canterbury and eastern Britain Crinodendron

hookerianum definitely needs shelter and some shade as the books say. Perhaps just because it, too, is a Crinodendron, or because somebody once wrote it down and the error has passed from book to book, Criniodendron patagua is invariably described in reference books as having similar requirements: shelter from wind, constantly moist soil and shade. I lost three plants of Crinodendron patagua through following these instructions, before I twigged that something was wrong and it probably wasn't me. So I poked Crinodendron No. 4 into the front of a border in full sun, exposed to every nor’wester that blows. That made it so happy that within 18 months it was two metres tall, and now, seven years later, it is a handsome small tree.

If this proves anything, it is that you should never be dogmatic about plants. This is the message I try to get across to readers, and insofar as it is possible I try not to tell them what they should grow, or how they should grow it; rather, I tell them what I have done, and how it has worked out in my garden. At the same time, I do what I can to inject some entertainment into a subject that is too often

treated with a heavy hand. *

Part of the craft — and that is what it is — of writing readable articles lies in the use of simple, straightforward English. I don’t shy away from using botanical names — I don’t go along with the myth that people are frightened off by scientific names. The ordinary reader has no difficulty with these if their origins and meaning are explained. The use of jargon is different Some technical terms are unavoidable, but where a simple English word is available it should be used. And I try to avoid some of the common misusages of horticultural writers. “Cultivating the soil” is one. You do not cultivate the soil, you till it or plough it, or dig it It is the plants that you cultivate! I don’t by the way, keep clippings of my gardening notes. If, as sometimes happens, I write more than once about the same plants I research them afresh each time, so that each column is written from a completely fresh viewpoint. Knowledge and opinions are constantly changing. This approach may not guarantee originality, but it does encourage spontaneity, something that is lacking from a lot of local writing. <