Garden view
Gardening knowledge is a hard-won thing, says Naomi Slade. Just beware the armchair experts!
Gardening wisdom is a hard-won thing. Naomi Slade shares some useful advice
Gardening is a heavyweight activity in this country. As a child you have gardening neighbours, gardening relatives; all these people who seem to know stuff. Out in all weathers, engaging in obscure seasonal rituals – picking, pruning, flower shows… Once you catch the bug, it never goes away. It just becomes more specific as life moves on. My First Houseplant becomes My First Garden and, gradually, Gardeners’ World becomes a Friday night staple. From there it’s a slippery slope to being glued to coverage of RHS Chelsea Flower Show, feeling inspired and inadequate in equal measure: a hopeless addict to impossible dreams. Somehow, there’s always someone out there who’s better or more knowledgeable. Their cabbages and roses are magnificent; their trained fruit is the stuff of dreams. Their potatoes are untainted by blight. Their borders bouffant and beautiful. Their hanging baskets are immune to the ravages of weather. Immaculate plants: situation normal. Yet gardening is so culturally ingrained that even those individuals who proudly claim that their fingers inflict certain death on surrounding vegetation, have pearls of wisdom to impart. “I don’t know anything about gardening, but even I know…” they declare. Then they proffer a tip with a confidence that can’t be shaken. “You can’t move peonies,” they assert, although on further investigation they have no idea why not. “Plant snowdrops in the green!” Why? Why do something that’s the complete opposite of how you treat other bulbs? “Copper rings will stop slugs.” How? “Well, everybody knows.” Young and innocent, one tends to go along with this. But the trouble with such expertise, gleaned from the comfort of an armchair or extracted from some motherlode of national knowledge, is that much of it is wrong. You can move peonies – of course you can, how else could you buy them? Transplanting snowdrops in the green is a hangover from days past, when the poor bulbs were over-dried and often dead. Certainly, if you plant a growing bulb you know it’s alive, but it’s not very good for it. And slugs? Well take it from me, very little stops slugs completely. Not copper barriers, not coffee-grounds, not elevating the plant (I swear some molluscs can fly). A really wide strip of gravel is moderately effective – as long as you can guarantee dry weather. Or a large moat. Nematodes help. So does a hungry hedgehog on a mission. And possibly napalm. When I got my first job on a gardening magazine, many moons ago, I was met by a wall of expertise. Prone to bluffing it out in such circumstances, I opted for ‘A Triumph Of Research Over Prior Knowledge, With Heavy Reliance On Being Quick On The Uptake’. I think I got away with it. And, gradually, the penny dropped. These were people for whom rookie errors were history. Frosted broad beans of youth had been forgotten in the proud harvesting of exhibitiongrade pods. Damaged dahlia petals of ignorance had been niftily removed and the rest nudged up to fill the void. In short, these were people whose advice was worth having. At the RHS Autumn Show, I noticed that my hoary veg-exhibiting neighbour was using scissors to trim off torn cabbage leaves. “The judges assess what they see, not what they don’t,” he winked. And that’s the thing – we all do it. We envy perfection but forget where it comes from. That’s half the story. The rest is one of those real universal truths: you garden, you make mistakes and you learn from them. And the more you garden, the better you get! And that’s all you really need to know.
You garden, you make mistakes and you learn from them