We Made a Garden by Margery Fish Read Free Book Online Page B

and as he liked to dawdle over his bath and shaving he had ample opportunity to gaze with horror on what I had done the day before.
    He evidently thought about it for when the day came when I had finished the construction work and was ready to start planting he said ‘Now we’ll put in the pole roses’. ‘The what?’ I asked, aghast. As the house was a low one, and was built on a very much lower level than this part of the garden, I had planned to plant my beds with low growing plants, to give a tapestry effect, and if I wanted any very tall things they were to go at the back and at the sides. I had widened the path winding up between the beds and it was on either side of this path that the roses, trained up their poles, were to be planted. And they were. There was nothing I could do to stop it, no argument had any effect. Walter assured me that they would be the making of my garden and I’d like them in the end, so they were planted with due care and ceremony and I had to plan my planting round them.
    I can’t remember all the roses we chose; there was nothing very outstanding among them except, perhaps, Cupid, which I think is one of the loveliest of climbers, with its large single shell-pink flowers and golden stamens. It has the most devastating thorns I know but I can even forgive it that lustiness for the beauty of its flowers. Others we chose were Chaplin’s Pink, Climbing Lady Hillingdon and General McArthur, Melody, Paul’s Scarlet and some very old ones such as Gloire de Dijon and Wm Allen Richardson.
    I discovered that it was unwise for me to plant too near the roses. This was not only because their wandering branches clawed my hair and scratched my hands, but to keep out of the way of the manure with which Walter fed them. Walter believed in manuring with a very generous hand and woe betide any little plant of mine that grew nearby, as it would surely die of suffocation under the great gollops of manure that were plastered round every rose. All the manure we could get was devoted to the roses and dahlias. Neither of us was very concerned about the welfare of the vegetables. If sometimes I thought any of my children were in need of a little stimulant I had to steal little bits from the roses when my husband was not looking. When I was doing this I always remembered his oft repeated belief that women had no sense of honesty!
    When, later on, we were able to get more manure and I was allowed a little Walter did not like the way I used it. He always accused me of being mean with manure, and disliked very much the way I used it on my flower beds. I was so frightened of getting the manure on the plants that I took endless care to dot the ground with small pieces, well away from the plants. As we drove round the countryside Walter delighted in pointing out the massive heaps of manure dumped quite close together all over the fields, waiting to be spread. That is the way to use manure,’ he’d say, ‘not the way you put it on.’ I still use manure sparingly on the flower beds. We spread it lavishly in the kitchen garden but only the roses, and such things as delphiniums, phlox and dahlias, which have big appetites, get really big helpings. Christmas roses like some manure in the summer; it helps to keep them moist if it is not possible to give them plenty of water. Many people consider too much manure on the flower garden produces too luxuriant foliage at the expense of the flowers. It depends, I think, on your soil and what you take out of it. I cram my beds with plants and feed them well, and my hard clay soil needs plenty of humus. Even if you are not a manure fan it is not a bad idea to water your plants with manure flavoured water just before they are coming into bloom. If you have no liquid manure, to be well diluted before being used, it is quite easy to drop a small sack of manure into a watering can, leave it for a while and use the infusion. The plants will show their gratitude by giving even better