GARDEN GOSSIP

Bill Hutchings

At their last meeting the Magazine Committee went through those questionnaires which had been returned. Some of them had comments written on the back. One comment was 'Why don't the garden Gossip articles tell us what we ought to be doing in our gardens?' or words to that effect. The answer to this is quite simple - because I write it.

When I first started to write these articles way back in July 1993, (was it really that long ago?) I wasn't quite sure of exactly how I would go about it. I did start off by including a few tips about gardening. It was in the following February that I mentioned some of the stories which have become attached to plants - in this case the myrtle - and I felt that this was something more interesting. In April and May came a potted history of Nicholas Fouquet. I really enjoyed writing that - I had to delve into various books for information, and I learned a lot about other things in the process. The actual process of gardening then intruded until December, when stories about plants came up - a collection of titbits that I had collected over the years.

Plants and how to treat them took up most of 1995, the highlight for me being when I was asked what I knew about worms. I didn't know much at the time, but I knew a lot more by the time the article was finished. 1996 went on much as before, except for March when I indulged myself in learning about the patron saints of gardeners, and wrote some of what I had found out. And so it went on, year after year, talking about plants and how to grow them, sometimes being a bit more technical and talking about different types of soil, or the way in which plants actually grow, or pests and diseases. But occasionally, usually in December, I would wander away from plants and talk about people, or plant fables, or history. They are the things that I find more interesting, the things that I have to research, the things that give me a chance to look at plants as other than things growing in the garden.

But why won't I write about what to do in the garden. There are two main reasons. Firstly, I am not a qualified horticulturalist. My training has been in workshop practice, electrics and electronics. Knowing how to make steel by the Bessemer process is not much use when making John Innes composts. Being able to use a drilling machine is no help when digging a hole to plant a shrub. Instructing on the workings of a three phase variable speed commutator induction motor is not the same as telling people when to bend over the tops of their onions. And being able to tell whether a flip-flop is astable, monostable or bistable is no help when trying to tell the difference between rhododendrons and azaleas. Secondly, there is not enough room in the magazine to do it. After all, people will want to know what to do in the vegetable garden, the herbaceous and mixed borders, the shrubbery, the orchard, the herb garden, the pots and troughs on the patio. And the lawn. The average gardening magazine not only has something like five pages to do this, it also has several paid experts who combine their efforts to fill those pages.

So, anyone wanting a garden calendar will either have to look elsewhere, or find somebody that is willing to write one. There are plenty of magazines which give such advice, much better advice than I could give; daily papers do as well. And there are plenty of gardening encyclopedias which deal with such matters. But to me, writing about such things would be boring. It might be different if I got paid for doing it, but the Church magazine is run as a voluntary organisation. Nobody is asked to write an article about some particular subject. Everything submitted is written by somebody that finds the subject interesting, and wants to share their interest with other people.

This will be the seventy-seventh thing that I have written under the title 'Garden Gossip', and now I would like to hang up my trowel and secateurs (metaphorically speaking, of course). I have been considering this for some months. I hope to carry on writing about other things, as I have been doing, but I won't feel committed to having to do something for every issue of the magazine. That will be a relief. So if there is anyone out there who wants to carry on writing about plants and gardening, feel free. I for one will enjoy reading what you say.

Bill Hutchings