YOUR GARDEN AND MINE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 80, 3 January 1941, Page 42

YOUR GARDEN AND MINE

By

Ann Earncliff

Brown

(No. 54)

"A Lazy Garden" OR nearly three years I struggled F against the temptation to make the raised garden into what a stern nurseryman terms "a lazy man’s garden." Now I hope I’ve come to a reasonable compromise with both my conscience and the nurseryman, The raised garden, as perhaps I’ve already told you, is really a very long sand bank with a low retaining wall of bricks -four deep. The garden faces east, and has a break-wind of poplars to the west with a neat manuka-laced fence up which I once could grow lovely sweet peas. With a top dressing of leaf mould and almost constant spraying the garden grew also wallflowers, carnations, iceland poppies, bearded iris, lavender and veldt daisies. Each year has found the growing more difficult and the results less pleasing, for the roots of the trees have come burrowing and robbing, and the soil appears more and more like the sand of the desert-hot, arid and unsuited to such plants. For a Background True, a wistaria is battling along quite well, each year creeping further afield, and in time I have hopes of a really effective background. The mnurseryman pooh-poohed my suggestion of mesembry anthemum-all shades. "Don’t you think. they are quite lovely?" I demanded.

"Yes! Quite, where you can’t grow anything else-but a lazy man’s garden when all’s said and done." Meekly I ordered one Donard’s seedling, cheering up as I pictured the lovely hybrid broom in flower; one Cotoneaster-thymifolia-the red berries allured me; one Crataegus Angustifolia- you remember the soft grey green foliage and gay orange berries; a demure rosemary for its aromatic scent and dainty wee flowers; and a red manuka. As advised I had very wide deep holes dug and filled with good leaf mould and soil. Quite Good Growth Last Autumn we planted those hardy shrubs and they have all made quite good growth and promise to thrive well, but because I still hanker for the splashes of bright colour I’ve lately planted pieces of mesembry anthemum at intervals along the low wall, and I suspect that I’m going to enjoy my lazy garden quite a lot. When the sun shines on hot sand covered ‘with thick green fleshy ice plants, they'll look and feel happier there, where at present only the veldt daisies flourish in the heat. To-morrow I must give a final earthup to potatoes that threaten to lift the soil with their abundance. Also I'll make a sowing of peas, French beans, and lettuce. The tomato plants are just leaping ahead in the long hot days, and seem to take a perverse delight in growing side-shoots that I must pinch out. No wonder I like my lazy garden best,