YOUR GARDEN AND MINE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 72, 8 November 1940, Page 36

YOUR GARDEN AND MINE

By

Ann Earncliff

Brown

(No. 50)

Nursery Manners LL nicely brought up children are A taught that it is naughty to pinch, and even the less. carefully guarded infant soon learns that it is a dangerous game. Legs and arms shoot out very vigorously in retaliation. In fact nursery pinching in humans has nothing to recommend it. However, if you have from kindliness or prudence suppressed a secret desire to pinch your brothers and sisters, you may very usefully gratify your ambition by pinching out many kinds of plants in your garden. Like the human "pinchee" the nipped plant hits out with the beneficial result that subjects which tend to grow straggly and spindly (where a compact bushy growth is desired) are thus encouraged to make side growths. Chrysanthemums should be pinched back quite soon if you have not already given the young growths their first pinching back. Some varieties of chrysanthemums require a second "stopping," but the gardener can judge best for himself if or when to repeat the pinch. Vigorous types can be made to bush out and

produce trusses of bloom, although the exhibition grower naturally does not sacrifice quality for quantity and will disbud very carefully. It is impossible to give a list of all flowering plants which benefit by being pinched out but cosmeas, antirrhinums, nemesias and phlox are all much improved by a judicious pinch at this time. A further impropriety in our nursery life lay in the use of certain unhallowed words. A friend of mine still looks disapprovingly at me when I speak of "bastard trenching," while recently another fastidious female, telling me a story which involved a certain type of tree, paused, then, with embarrassment continued: " You know those elms, er — mongrel elms." As I did not appear to know them she added in a kind of apologetic mumble, "Common people call them ‘ Bastard Elms.’" Well common garden people are quite within the bounds of horticultural etiquette when they refer to either elms or trenching of the particular class as bastard-one more inhibition removed for us by the Good Earth!