less worthy subjects among your permanent collection.
It requires great faith to allow the right amount of space when planting, but when you do the results are surprising. Michaelmas daisies, as an example, if grown properly with individual shoots about a foot apart (half the height is the usual allowance) make themselves into fat bushy plants which are a joy to behold (and need a stout stake to uphold). Annuals should be thinned out ruthlessly and instead of spindly specimens those that are left will show you what can be done when a plant has adequate space in which to develop. I have seen a single plant of night-scented stock make a bush about eighteen inches square, not because of my strong mindedness, I fear, but owing to the fact that all its little brothers and sisters died in infancy and it was left alone.
9. Staking
When it came to staking I came to grief badly. In the first place I did not stake early enough, and quite a lot of handsome heads of flowers were condemned by my mentor because they were crooked by the time I did tie them up. Nothing will straighten a plant that has grown crooked. And when I did stake I was accused of doing it too loosely. My idea was to allow the plants to grow as naturally as I could so I put a few sticks at the outside of each clump and tied string—not too tightly—to the sticks. I admit it wasn’t satisfactory because the wind blew the flowers about mercilessly in my little enclosures and they got tangled and bent. I was warned that I must be more drastic but took no heed. So Walter taught me a lesson. He got stout stakes (mine were slight because I didn’t want them to show too much) and he drove them into the ground with a mallet. Then he took those poor unsuspecting flowers, put a rope round their necks and tied them so tightly to the stake that they looked throttled. He put into the action all the exasperation he felt at a pigheaded woman who just would not learn. I did learn then, because I knew what would happen to my poor flowers if my staking was sloppy. I never achieved the perfection that was preached to me, that is, a stick for each stem, but I was more generous with sticks and I made an elaborate cage of string between them so that the flowers had little play. Most people use twigs or peasticks for their staking and it is quite successful in ordinary soil, but I never succeeded because I couldn’t get the rough sticks sufficiently deep into my heavy clay, and they were never firm. I could use a mallet with straight sticks, and though it made more work, it was the only thing to do.
There are, of course, other good ways of supporting one’s flowers. In a very big border, full of big plants, coarse netting stretched over posts gives magnificent support. For individual plants there are excellent wire circles that are placed flat on the ground over the plant and raised on upright supports as it develops. With this method the plant starts right and gives no trouble at all, but it is not very easy to use these supports on very big clumps without a lot of wasteful overlapping.
Now I use metal supports in the form of a half circle with long prongs that are pushed into the ground. I copied the idea from a friend and got the local blacksmith to make them for me in all weights, sizes and heights. To preserve them and to make them less conspicuous I have painted them dark green. Sometimes I use two to make a complete circle, or one with string tied behind it. In large plantings half a dozen or more can be used at different angles and for supporting plants along a wall they are ideal, as the flowers hang over slightly in a natural way. I make a practice of putting them in very early, pushing them in a long way to begin with, and pulling them up as the stalks grow taller. When one lot of plants have finished blooming and no longer need support I lift out the wires and put them in to help the next lot of plants that are coming on.
There are people who will not admit the
It requires great faith to allow the right amount of space when planting, but when you do the results are surprising. Michaelmas daisies, as an example, if grown properly with individual shoots about a foot apart (half the height is the usual allowance) make themselves into fat bushy plants which are a joy to behold (and need a stout stake to uphold). Annuals should be thinned out ruthlessly and instead of spindly specimens those that are left will show you what can be done when a plant has adequate space in which to develop. I have seen a single plant of night-scented stock make a bush about eighteen inches square, not because of my strong mindedness, I fear, but owing to the fact that all its little brothers and sisters died in infancy and it was left alone.
9. Staking
When it came to staking I came to grief badly. In the first place I did not stake early enough, and quite a lot of handsome heads of flowers were condemned by my mentor because they were crooked by the time I did tie them up. Nothing will straighten a plant that has grown crooked. And when I did stake I was accused of doing it too loosely. My idea was to allow the plants to grow as naturally as I could so I put a few sticks at the outside of each clump and tied string—not too tightly—to the sticks. I admit it wasn’t satisfactory because the wind blew the flowers about mercilessly in my little enclosures and they got tangled and bent. I was warned that I must be more drastic but took no heed. So Walter taught me a lesson. He got stout stakes (mine were slight because I didn’t want them to show too much) and he drove them into the ground with a mallet. Then he took those poor unsuspecting flowers, put a rope round their necks and tied them so tightly to the stake that they looked throttled. He put into the action all the exasperation he felt at a pigheaded woman who just would not learn. I did learn then, because I knew what would happen to my poor flowers if my staking was sloppy. I never achieved the perfection that was preached to me, that is, a stick for each stem, but I was more generous with sticks and I made an elaborate cage of string between them so that the flowers had little play. Most people use twigs or peasticks for their staking and it is quite successful in ordinary soil, but I never succeeded because I couldn’t get the rough sticks sufficiently deep into my heavy clay, and they were never firm. I could use a mallet with straight sticks, and though it made more work, it was the only thing to do.
There are, of course, other good ways of supporting one’s flowers. In a very big border, full of big plants, coarse netting stretched over posts gives magnificent support. For individual plants there are excellent wire circles that are placed flat on the ground over the plant and raised on upright supports as it develops. With this method the plant starts right and gives no trouble at all, but it is not very easy to use these supports on very big clumps without a lot of wasteful overlapping.
Now I use metal supports in the form of a half circle with long prongs that are pushed into the ground. I copied the idea from a friend and got the local blacksmith to make them for me in all weights, sizes and heights. To preserve them and to make them less conspicuous I have painted them dark green. Sometimes I use two to make a complete circle, or one with string tied behind it. In large plantings half a dozen or more can be used at different angles and for supporting plants along a wall they are ideal, as the flowers hang over slightly in a natural way. I make a practice of putting them in very early, pushing them in a long way to begin with, and pulling them up as the stalks grow taller. When one lot of plants have finished blooming and no longer need support I lift out the wires and put them in to help the next lot of plants that are coming on.
There are people who will not admit the
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