COMMON SENSE IN GARDENING

Evening Star, Issue 22881, 12 February 1938, Page 21

COMMON SENSE IN GARDENING

TRIAL AND EXPERIENCE - Much of the education, of gardeners is arbitrary and by rule of thumb. It pursues a routine without the learners’ always knowing or probing the reasons for it; when they meet something outside their experience they are nonplussed, and gardening presents a constant succesion of problems. Our climate alone provides enough (writes a correspondent of the London ‘ Times.’ y It has been truly said that observation is the true gardener’s secret, for without it the man is a machine; but observation of plants is probably not innate with anyone. Some men and whmon successfully handle plants that are strangers to them as if to the manner born; they are usually called born gardeners. The youth who has this quality, however, is rare, and it is wiser to suppose that those in whom it develops in time are born with the faculties, sympathies, and common sense that enable them to acquire the art of managing plants. Observation without the sense to apply its lessons is useless, and the gardener-owner who sees a plant every day but fails to observe its ways from the_ time it begins to wake in spring till it goes to rest later on will never become a cultivator. The lessons are learned by experiment, and so the best gardeners are constantly observing and experimenting, noting the results, profiting by their failures, and so accumulating the experience which means so much. Flower gardening is not an exact science, and usually it is more of an artificial than a natural process. In this country, where gardens are packed with foreign plants, it depends largely on the power of those plants to adapt themselves to strange surroundings and conditions and the gardener’s ability to help them on. The more elusive the plant the harder -will the cultivator try to help it, and common sense will often suggest the course. Plants with tap roots, like the poppies, to take a simple example, will not be put into shallow ground, nor will those with leaves that wilt in the sun of a mid-summer afternoon be put into the eye of the sun. Woolly plants will bo helped over an abnormally wet time, and those that send their roots out far and wide into the domain of other plants will be restrained.

Foreign plants that naturally grow in moist places mil first be tried in such places here, and if they fail it ■will probably be because places that are moist in Britain are usually moister still in winter; so that the plant which is probably dry after the rainy season, or covered with snow in the wilds, is drowned. Common sense will find a way. of meeting the point before the gardener begins the experiment and so avoid one cause of failure. High mountain plants which naturally live on, thin fare will not be put into rich soil, just as pseonies, roses, and other plants with hearty appetites will have their needs supplied. Over-feeding, however, brings its own punishment, and experiment, will find the happy mean.