Gardens
Elders and betters
Ursula Buchan
When I was a very young gardener, few things made me more impatient than the conservatism of older ones. Conservatism seemed to be calcified in the very bones of the old boys I worked with, who appeared almost ridiculous to me in their subfusc trousers held up by leather belts, their waistcoats, their flat caps and their pipes of tobacco. They seemed to want to look and sound as much like Edwardian head gardeners as they could (these having been their boyhood heroes, I suppose) and their ideas, though often rather charming, were scarcely more advanced. They had practical skills that we can only dream of now, although, in retrospect, I see they were not invariably right. I remember, for example, being taught to pot up pelargoniums by ramming the loam-based potting compost round the roots hard with a wooden stick. How these men imagined that any pot plant could thrive when its roots were deliberately starved of oxygen is beyond me.
Now I am rather older, I find conservatism creeps on, like a low river mist, threatening to obscure interesting new ideas. I have to fight the tendency. I catch myself tut-tutting at the sloppy gardening methods exhibited on Gardeners’ World, as if it really mattered. The truth is that gardening has changed in many ways and — if one wants to be neutral and objective about these things — it had to.
One aspect of contemporary gardening I have had difficulty accepting in the past is the vastly increased use of dwarfing rootstocks for fruit trees which are sold for garden planting. (The scion, or variety, of a tree is grafted on to a rootstock, which controls its vigour.) There are a number of dwarfing, semi-dwarfing and semi-vigorous rootstock; in the case of apples, they are distinguished from each other by M or MM numbers, while pear rootstocks are called Quince ‘A’ (semi-vigorous) and Quince ‘C’ (semi-dwarfing).
These dwarfing and semi-dwarfing rootstocks are fine, indeed necessary, for commercial orchards, since they come into ‘bearing’ quickly and they are short enough to be sprayed, pruned and picked from the ground. The soil has to be fertile for them, and the most dwarfing stocks need to be staked, for they are weak, but that is not normally a problem. However, in gardens, these neat and tidy trees seem dull and jejune to me, only really justified if the trees are to be trained in ‘restricted’ forms, i.e., as ‘step-overs’, espaliers, cordons or fans. The beauty of a tall, crooked and eccentric standard tree on an M25 rootstock cannot be easily exaggerated, nor its contribution to atmosphere, in a cottage garden especially.
Cherries, however, are another matter, as I hope I am just about to find out. I have ordered for January delivery three young trees grafted on to ‘Gisela 5’ or ‘G5’, a newish rootstock which has a more dwarfing effect than the longer-established ‘Colt’. This rootstock restricts the height of a cherry to 6 to 8 ft tall. The beauty of it is that I shall be able to plant these three trees inside my fruit cage. They will take the place of strawberries, recently removed after virus had begun to undermine their energy and fruitfulness.
The main reason I wish to plant these trees in the fruit cage is that cherries are the very food of the gods to blackbirds and other common garden avians. Netting a cherry grown in the open is never wholly successful and is often simply a disagreeable way of trapping birds. Pretty as the white cherry blossom undoubtedly is (or it would not have had a shoe polish named after it, surely?), it is not a good enough reason to grow sweet cherries. What is more, cherries are by far the best if picked when ripe, which they are not for shop sale, and they keep for only a few days. That is why you really have to grow them yourself.
The exact choice of varieties has been governed by a mix of epicureanism and practicality, in about equal measure. ‘Stella’ and ‘Sunburst’ are self-fertile and healthy varieties, the first with large red juicy fruits, the second with black ones, while ‘Merton Glory’ is a self-sterile variety, which happens to be pollinated by ‘Stella’ and ‘Sunburst’, and is a ‘white’ cherry. It is not, strictly speaking, white, but has a yellow skin, which is flushed crimson, and white juice. It is a good pollinator of other varieties. All three are ready to pick in July.
The growing of exotic fruit, such as cherries, used to be the preserve (ouch!) of those employed gardeners I once worked with, who were the only people with the time, patience and skill to cultivate them properly. Now it seems any gardener can grow them. Even when at my most conservative, I cannot regret that.
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