Friday 24 February 2012

A Small Miracle

Taking over other people's garden is always an interesting experience, not least because they may not have the same taste in plants.  I remember when we first moved to our house in Sussex, the following spring was a huge shock as the garden burst into a riot of clashing rhododendron and azalea colours - bright pinks shouting alongside strident yellows.  Coming from the cool, pale, everything must blend, school of gardening the effect made my eyes ache.  When we left seven years later, the spring display was one of my favourite bits of the garden.

Our first summer here, I grumped somewhat at the sight of the pale lipstick pink rose hedge that runs the length of the swimming pool. Such a girly colour. I much prefer roses in deep reds and dark purples.  But now, five winters on, I have just been pruning them and my heart lifts at the thought of their bursting into colour in May and blooming right through til the first frosts.

I love pruning.  I follow my father's practice of pruning to within an inch of their lives.  My mother was always terrified when my father set out into the garden with a set of secateurs in his hand.  But I know that heady feeling. Suddenly everywhere I look there are twigs and branches just crying out to be brought under control.

The lipstick pink rose bushes were planted by someone before the previous owners. So that makes at least twenty winters someone has marched into the garden and attacked those bushes with a set of secateurs.  And every year they come back and send up long green wands of new growth smothered in blossom.  We take it for granted that pruning works, but it is one of nature's small miracles.

And I now have a great pile of cuttings that I can pop into pots that in time will give me new (free) roses for this large, unruly garden.

Must go now, got the wisteria to prune!



8 comments:

  1. I enjoyed this, Sue and it's given me the courage to be not such a timid pruner. :-) Gardening is one of the many areas where I wish my mother hadn't died so relatively young, as she was a wonderfully knowledgeable gardener. Now I just pick up scraps if information where I can. :-)

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  2. Sorry to hear you didn't have a chance to benefit as much as you would have liked from your mother's wisdom. The thing I hang on to is that nature is wonderfully forgiving. Also, I had a great beginning to it all - my time in Brazil - where you could stick anything in the ground and it grew enormous. Gave me lots of confidence. (I thought all gardening was that easy!) :)

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  3. I entirely agree about the degree of satisfaction to be gained from a session of good 'hard' pruning - I managed to get all of the roses done in January, and have been avidly watching bud progress ever since. For anybody unsure of the right approach, I heartily recommend John Cushnie's 'How To Prune', which is invaluable.

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  4. Thanks so much for the book recommendation, Pomiane. Just what i need.

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  5. Yes thanks Pomiane for the recommendation. Like cookery books, one can never have too many gardening books. :)

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  6. A lot of the gardening books will 'tell' you when to prune and plant and sow. Here in SW France you have to adapt to it possibly being four/six weeks ahead of Wisley and certainly local rules apply. Unless you are desparate to have a Surrey cottage garden then it's follow the natives. I too miss my Mum. Does the gardening/cooking/sewing gene skip a generation?

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  7. BTW. It took two goes to prove that I'm not a robot.
    The letters look like a smudged Basque word in Cyrillic

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  8. Hi Lesley, I know what you mean about the "robot barrier" sometimes it's impossible to see what the letters are meant to be. Ah, the gardening/ cooking/ sewing gene! I think my Mum did those things because she had to, though she did them well. Dad was the gardener - although he said he was just a "tidier" I could do with him here as I have about 8 projects on the go, all incomplete! I could also do with a housework gene sometimes!

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