Garden view
All the best gardeners have green fingers and a heart of steel, says Helen Billiald
With green fingers and a heart of steel, Helen Billiald turns cold-blooded tree killer when its shade threatens her veg
Last week I turned murderer. Worse still, I paid someone else to do the dirty work for me. Our walnut tree is no more. It cropped prolifically, gave the best summer shade and was my children’s preferred climbing tree, so why sign its death warrant? Because, while it was still a relative whippersnapper (we guess 35 years old), its canopy was capacious and increasingly so. Crucially, it had been planted on the south side of our walled garden, so at different times of day its shade touched two thirds of that garden; an area where light, productivity and an absence of tree roots are key.
Nurturing nature
Gardening requires an unlikely skillset. You need to be nurturing and ruthless, which is a combination that can be hard to square off. Can you get to know your plants intimately and still possess the strength to turn killer when the situation changes? And, things do change; it’s horticulture’s one constant. Thinning seedlings is a case in point. I’ve cracked the ruthless side with module sowing, since there’s an obsessive part of me that loves the orderly one-seedling-to-a-plug grid of a module tray. However, I still struggle with direct-sown lines. What if there’s sudden slug or rabbit damage? Wouldn’t keeping a few spares be sensible? I always sow two courgette or cucumber seeds to a pot, but one of those seedlings has to be an absolute runt for me to take it out. Otherwise, whatever my intentions when sowing, I’m potting them both up. I’m far more brutal when pruning. I blame my fruit-farm youth – once you’ve seen apple trees pruned with a chainsaw, you realise how robust these plants really are. In fact I suspect I overdo it – hedgelaying would suit me to a tee. And yet I’ll confess to feeling slightly queasy when thrusting a spade through the heart of a clump of perennials. Perhaps it’s because I do most pruning when trees are dormant, while dividing plants can take place when perennials are more obviously alive. Grafting is the best example of how new life can spring from an apparently merciless act. What a mix of alchemy and brutal magic! As a child, I watched entire orchards being conjured to life by my father, slicing rootstock and scion into matching ‘v’s, then slotting and binding them together. It’s paradoxical that getting the untamed ‘natural’ look tends to require levelling the land first. Just think of the work that can go into establishing a wildflower meadow: stripping off turf and topsoil, then repeatedly burning off weeds. Gentle it isn’t. When we arrived at our current garden we could hardly push our way through the garden door. Inside were roses draped with bindweed, buddleia hidden by butterflies, huge lemon-scented Magnolia grandiflora f lowers, a water tank twitching with mosquito larvae and yellow swathes of ragwort. It remains emblazoned on my memory as one of the most romantic garden scenes I’ve ever encountered. Except the only way forwards was to clear almost everything and work backwards, softening and reintroducing the magic wherever we can. Gardening is a funny old game.
“Can you know your plants intimately, then turn killer?”
Helen Billiald is a garden writer with a PhD in Ecology and an MSc in Pest Management. She’s wondering what to do with 50 thriving courgette plants