WENDY TALKS

Taranaki Daily News, 13 October 1934, Page 21 (Supplement)

WENDY TALKS

ABOUT GARDENS. Dear Tinks: I wonder if you have seen the gardening notes that Hut Gardener has written for our corner to-day. The Hut folk have been asking him for suggestions for their gardens, so now they have asked him to give you some “tips,” too. ; I wish you could see the different little plots in the Hut garden this year, each one belonging to one of the family at the Hut, of course. Tinker Bell’s is pretty and neat with ever so many blue flowers in it—mostly bush hyacinths at present, with a few blue primroses too, and clums of dainty blue-bells. At the back is an .old tree stump covered with blue Argentine pea, and soon this is going to be a mass of colour for the first heads are already in flower and there are crowds and crowds of buds growing bluer and bluer every day. Billikins’ garden is very different. You see, when he dug it Over, in the first place, and got it ready for planting he decided he was going to have a flower garden this year for a change,, so as it is next to a tall wooden fence he immediately planted a row of sweet peas along it so that they would grow up and make a pretty background for the rest of the flowers. But after he had planted 1 that row he remembered how proud he had been last year of his soldierly row of cabbages and cauliflowers and onions and leeks and all the other things that he had had in his garden, that he decided he would like to have them again this year—instead of flowers “just jumbled anywhere!”

So now, you see, the result is that his garden is a “flower-vegetable” one! The sweet-peas are climbing gaily up the wire-netting on the fence and when the flowers appear they will be able to look down on leeks, turnips, radishes, onions, peas, potatoes and beans all ranged in orderly lines, while round the edge of the garden, forming a border, they will gee some gay little yellow and purple violas wondering however they came to be in such a strange place. “That’s just what Billikins would do!” The rest of the Hut folk say, but Billikins just grins cheerfully and goes on with his work. Now for the Twins. Their garden is a proper vegetable garden, they say. They have a littk path running through it dividing it into two so that Peter works in one half and Pam in the other. They both plant exactly the same things, and each half of the garden has exactly the same number of rows, so if one half happens to have a better crop than the other I wonder whatever they will do!

There are all kinds of flowers in no order at all in Baby Margaret's garden, for when she was making it she collected plants of all the flowers she could find and planted them straight away. So now she has marigolds and Iceland poppies flowering gaily, - well as nemesia, tulips and primroses, and a few lonely daffodils and carnations. There is a gay little border of Virginian stock round the very edge, and some hollyhocks are beginning to grow up straight and tall at the back. She is very proud of her garden, of course, and Dicky Boy is too (for he helps her weed it sometimes), and when the summer time comes she says she thinks it will be the gayest of them all. I wonder if she will be right. Wendy.