Groundwork for Spring gardens laid in autumn and winter

Press, 29 September 1988, Page 27

Groundwork for Spring gardens laid in autumn and winter

The advent of spring triggers off a variety of responses in people. Romance blossoms in young hearts, the middle aged think thankfully of lower heating bills, while the old move easier through the days. For gardeners it is the time when sins of both commission and omission tend to catch up with one. One of the major traps of spring gardening is that to succeed, the groundwork should have been carried out through autumn and winter. The only way to obtain a good spring showing of bulbs is to have planted them out a month or two before spring arrives. • Perhaps as a result of the much-vaunted "greenhouse effect" many of the predictable winter gardening rites have been thrown awry. My roses had already started to bud in August, the traditional time for a good, vicious pruning party. As a result:the more robust speciments gained a regulation lopping while the more fragile old roses received the equivalent of a light trim. September used to be the time new lawns were established on my hillside section.

This year with the rapid arrival of fairly warm weather I suspect it will be more difficult to get a good growth of green sward. Which is something of a pity. Gardeners tend to fall into two broad categories — the doctrinaire by-the-book variety and the more instinctual, impulsive type. The more orthodox gardener tends to like nurturing an established system of beds and lawns. Come spring creatures of impulse such as myself are seized with a desire to rearrange everything. This compulsion has only been modified by spending one summer in the equivalent of a dwarf Kansas dust bowl. The hard learnt lesson from that galling time was to begin to focus the interfering instinct on smaller tracts of earth. As a result this year four flower beds, half a vegetable patch and two lawns will be left to prosper with the minimum of disruption. The larger lawn, half the former vegetable patch and a new garden resulting from a retaining wail will be the focal

points of my obsession with level terraces on a hillside section. These major projects will constitute the bulk of my own anarchistic version of spring gardening. In the quiet zones the fruits of several years of cottage garden aspiration are now visible and thriving. Hollyhocks, roses, stock and similar cottage staples have taken on their own dynamic life. Increasingly I find the miserly side of my nature coming to the surface. This has resulted in an increasing reliance on growing flowers and vegetables from seed. To my delight I have found all that is required is a few warm windowsills, some reliable soil mix and a vaguely tolerant spouse. This year the goal is to attain a more low-main-tenance garden. One of my all-time favourite sayings is, "Life is what happens while you are making other plans.” Having recently joined the ranks of first-time parents I find that the time available for intensive gardening is disappearing with every welcome pound my son gains.