Wealden Times | WT263 | April 2024 | Garden Supplement inside

The Priceless Gardens Supplement
Smyrnium perfoliatum
Go with the F low
Sue Whigham shares some valuable new-to-gardening advice
istockphoto.com/ seven75 / PicturePartners
I’m sure that by now we should be used to the rain but
I’m not entirely sure that we are. We had a dry, sunny
day the other day and how everybody’s mood changed.
Some of us managed a quick first cut of our soggy lawns
just to give them some semblance of order. And what a
difference it makes.
We are very behind with our late winter tidy up having
left the borders for hibernating insects and foraging birds
to pick over. However, after reading Dan Pearson’s Spring
Dig Delve Newsletter, in which he says that he and his team
finished their cut back during the last week in February,
panic has set in! I’m sure, though, that with a bit of hard
work ‘little and often’, we’ll no doubt catch up.
But for those of you who might be new to gardening,
there might be a few tips that you’ll find useful...
Whilst it has been tipping it down outside, I’ve been
dipping into The Sceptical Gardener by Ken Thompson
who is both a biologist and a gardener. As he says, he has
been a gardener for more years than he cares to remember.
I was particularly taken with his Top 10 Don’ts which are
useful for gardening novices as well as for those who have
more experience. I for one have spent years cutting back
roses to an outside facing bud when pruning floribunda and
hybrid tea roses (although I have only one of the latter).
This is Rosa ‘Mrs. Oakley Fisher’, a 1920s introduction with
soft apricot single flowers and prominent anthers which
grows mid border. It got a bit smothered by bryony last year
and has already had the Ken Thompson treatment so we’ll
see how it looks later in the year. He suggests foregoing the
careful search for an outside bud especially if you have a lot
of roses and just cut the plant down hard.
At the top of my ‘to do’ list is ‘Prune Roses’. Tick for
having started on that but black marks for not having
secateurs cleaned and sharpened before sallying forth. In the
end both sets of secateurs are in ‘hospital’ having a thorough
overhaul and I’ve had to buy another cheaper pair as I
thought that the job just couldn’t wait. So don’t follow this
and invest in a decent pair in the first place and keep them
sharp and well oiled. You don’t want to tear at the rose stem
with blunt secateurs as you work on the plant.
Another don’t, especially useful for someone new to
gardening, is not to weed out every seedling in your borders
as soon as you spot them. Many plants are desperate to seed
and you never know what you might have. Once you know,
you can be more discerning but, until then, we have clouds
of Smyrnium perfoliatum seedlings in the border in front
of the house. I’m not sure how they got there but suspect
that we collected a few seeds along the way having spotted
an escapee clump on the edge of a local piece of woodland
a while ago. They are probably in the ‘wrong place’ as they
prefer dappled shade but they can have their day before a
few get moved around. There’s plenty of time for this as
they are biennial ie. ‘they take two years to grow from seed
to maturity’.
Another very useful tip, pertinent
after such a wet period, is to note what
happens to our gardens when it has
been so sodden for so long. We have
been on a hunt for our geums and
fear that they have been well and
truly lost. I wonder. The 50% of
our soil which is usually empty
space other than air has been
continuously filled up with
water for months and some
roots will inevitably have
drowned through
lack of oxygen.
Plants that have
adapted to damp
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