As I Hear . . . ROSES AND BEEF

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31119, 23 July 1966, Page 12

As I Hear . . . ROSES AND BEEF

(By

J.H.E.S.]

An exile from Christchurch must be gratified when he sees the Town Hall plan advanced to the stage where ground and elevation drawings and the related descriptions promise sure and distinguished fulfilment. It has been worth while to wait for this stage and to realise that the long battle of the sites, if it had been settled in favour of any one of them, could not have produced a comparable result. Christchurch has every reason to renewe its gratitude to Professor Stephenson, who so surely saw the whole when others had been partially and small and as partisans. The perhaps surprising and certainly creditable thing is that Professor Stephenson’s finding did not carry the battle into a new phase but ended it in immediate peace and applause. But does Christchurch even yet fully understand that it welcomed an occasion which will produce the first group of buildings to lift its architecture into grace and dignity—the first for many years? For the fact may as well be recognised that public architecture in Christchurch has little to raise its pride; and that little is the bequest of generations long past It was for this reason, largely, that I was sorry Councillor Hay so swiftly dismissed somebody’s suggestion that it was time to think of taking down the Salvation Army Citadel, no handsome pile, and of giving the new Town Hall block a neighbour less clumsy. Yes, said Mr Hay, in 30 years or so, when the present Citadel has outlived its usefulness; and it is easy enough to follow his thought The city will have plenty to do, for some years to come, in financing and building and fitting the new block, without leaping to another project however consonant and desirable. But it does no harm to set forth another such project and to study it on its merits. This is not leaping; it is only taking thought in time. The truth is that the Citadel is a dreary, ugly building. The truth is that, sited as it is, it will before long, beside better ones, look drearier and uglier than ever, out of keeping and

out of place. It can do no harm to plant that idea in the mind of the city planners and perhaps in the mind of some civic benefactor or syndicate of benefactors. * *

Still reading my gardening notes, I came on the annual item in “The Press” about demonstrations of rose prunings on dates in July, though the item added that pruning could (according to situation) often be well delayed beyond the end of the month to avoid frost damage to young growth. I have long been convinced that most rose pruning—I think especially of Christchurch—is done too early. I think even the end of July is too early. Once when I was farming in Opawa. I moved about 60 from an arid top-lawn bed to a new one, well prepared on a lower lawn. This job was not completed till some time in August I had shortened off the poor starvelings and cut back their long straying roots; and I gave them no very good chance. After leaving them a month to settle in, I pruned in September. They came away flourishingly, and into flower not long behind the roses pruned weeks, sometimes months, earlier. It was just at this time that I first read Humphrey John’s “The Skeptical Gardener,” which I quoted recently. It delighted me to find this.

If one prunes early one runs the risk of seeing the growth from carefully selected buds ruined by an April frost If one prunes late the rose beds are still green while every neighbour is boasting about his show of bloom. For years we spread our risks by distributing the pruning over a few four weeks; but in the disastrous spring of 1938 for week after long week I put off pruning until May was well in, when in despair I pruned everything. The result was surprising, for, though the beds were ten days later than my neighbours in flowering, .the vigour and cleanliness of the foliage and the size of the blooms was something we bad never before experienced: nor for the whole season

was there any trace of greenfly or mildew evident. I never again pruned earlier than August * * *

Poor Mr Pickering! Were his remarks in the Budget debate on some aspects of Parliamentary reporting really so outrageous? I heard what he said and read two reports and, to put it in a nutshell, thought that he had said very little more than that the Parliamentary reporters’ tendency to make a lively story of sensational episodes and to trim sober contributions to fallacious brevity can have a distorting effect, without the slightest intention to distort. Of such an intention I thought Mr Pickering showed nothing whatever. I may have been an unduly indulgent hearer and reader, since I had written something here, to a rather similar effect, before Mr Pickering spoke. But that is as may be. What I found most diverting was that he was at once heavily assailed by the opposition for his wicked attack on the press—by the opposition, which ever since Michael Joseph Savage showed the way has contrived occasions to complain, angrily, against the wicked newspapers. But one must be grateful to Mr Watt for rescuing from some paper its quotation of Mr Holyoake to the effect that we must stand “shoulder to shoulder and back to back, marching in the same general direction.” Si non e vero, e ben trovato. #

The Wellington Housewives Union, or some such body, has been sharply protesting against the scarcity of good grilling steak, for which it can see no sound reason. Perhaps there is no better one than that our stock-breeders have not yet found how to make 10 or 20 pounds of good grilling steak grow on a side of beef in place of the usual five. They may manage these things better in the United States, where, as every reader of American detective stories knows, nobody ever dines in a restaurant on anything but a slab of steak (good grilling type), French fried potatoes, and two martinis.