GARDEN NOTES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 43, 19 April 1940, Page 41

GARDEN NOTES

By

John R.

Cameron

| This week, in the uhavoidable absence of Anne Earncliff Brown’s usual article, another contributor breaks into verse in order to fill the breach. H, please let me grow, round a neat bungalow, new potatoes; and pansies and peas, and I'll make me a home, on the leaf-mould and loam, where all but the prospect will please. Spray ... spray on the trees, oh, spray with a will, where the codlins canoodle in swarms, while the aphis and mites, ‘in soul-stirring bites, grow fat on my two guinea corms, Oh, give me a home, and a fine tooth comb, and a heart like an old cannon ball, let me murder those pests, self invited as guests, with a gentleness tinctured with gall. Fumes... fumes in the soil, and fumes in the air, till naphthalene drives you away, while sulphur

and lime, in your throat all the time, makes the atmosphere cloudy all day. Oh, strengthen my urge, to complete a spring purge, on the snails and the slugs dining free, and when I ‘have scissored, them clean through the gizzard, I'll reap what I’ve sown-maybe. Hope ... hope! ain’t it strange, it’s wonderfully strange, how a man with a heart and a spade, continues to revel and toil like the devil, to marshal an insect parade. Oh, give me a home, ’neath a blue bending dome, where the seeds and the bulbs meet no ants, where the worms and the blight, knock off working at night, and cease kicking a man in the pants. Then... then I will sing, though my song may be rude, but the rake and the hoe. will at last get a show, and the garden will grow as it should,