NZBS GARDEN EXPERTS—1

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 889, 17 August 1956, Page 21

NZBS GARDEN EXPERTS—1

-OIL" fertility has always been the special concern of R. L. Thornton, who, for the past 23 years, has been 1YA’S gardening expeft. "Without a healthy soil you can’t have healthy crops; and without healthy crops you can’t have healthy people," he told The Listener. As a boy he learned the value of natural manuring in’ producing crops from barren, sandy soil in Wanganui, and this knowledge served him well when he was apprenticed to a nursery in Auckland. Later he took up landscape gardening, and laid out the gardens of the Middlemore Hospital, and Avondale Technical College. About eight years ago he joined the staff of the Mount Smart Domain Board, and became responsible for the care of 50 acres, including a_ large sanctuary of native plants. But gardening is not just Mr. Thornton’s occupation-it takes all his spare time, too. Every Tuesday at 8.15 p.m. he is on the air answering listeners’ questions; and on Thursdays at 8.15 p-m. he conducts the session In Your Garden This Week. He also takes Adult Education classes. " R.. L. Thornton is a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Horticulture, President of the Auckland Compost Society, and of the Carnation and Gerbera Society. He has also been elected a

special member of the New Zealand Lily Society and life member of several horticultural societies. In his own garden, a half-acre plot in Remuera, Mr. Thornton experiments with all the new varieties of plants and shrubs before he discusses them in his sessions and in the many lectures he is asked to give. By contrast, Eric Francis has been 1ZB’s gardening expert only since last November, when the _ session was switched from Saturday miornings to Thursday evenings at 10 o'clock, Eric has spent 34 years in the horticultural trade, and holds the seedsman’s diploma

of the Royal New Zealand Institute of Horticulture. At 14 he went to work for G. W. Wright, a well-known dahlia hybridist and pot-plant specialist, and he became keenly interested in the grow‘ing of gerberas. Nowadays his interests have broadened to include seeds, perennials and trees. One of the features listeners look forward to in Eric Francis’s sessions are the talks by guest speakers. Lately they have heard D. M. Robinson speaking about compost, Roy Sinclair on carnations, N. Joyce on pruning, A. Merfield on cloche-growing, and many others.