Most of us have our little bit of Eden by the house. Pint sized it may be but it is none the less very much a part of us, and helps to keep us evenly balanced. The sight of fresh new shoots and green leaves, and of emerging flower buds are very exciting things. In the course of our daily lives we also notice plants in other gardens, be they private or public gardens, and are often encouraged by them. Flower shows are designed to act as a kind of intellectual fertilizer. They stimulate interest.
Apart from our personal bits of paradise it seems to be the nature of man that we all appear to want and need quite large areas of land for recreational purposes. In New York there is Central Park – some 800 acres set aside for anyone who cares to use it. The city of Perth in Australia boasts King’s Park. Manchester in England has its Heaton Park, the largest public park in Western Europe, and London boasts many beautifully maintained open spaces and public parks. Here at home we have the National Park, and other open spaces, where we can stroll and picnic in peace and quiet, and it doesn’t cost all that much to escape the city and its environs and be on one of our great rivers experiencing a different kind of peace and solitude. It doesn’t take much to be in touch with nature and get away from the pandemonium of the city. There is normally some cost in all these leisure pursuits, involving personal inputs into the plants in the yard, and financial inputs made on our behalf by those we (sometimes misguidedly) trust with our rates and taxes.
Great thinkers have always sat under trees. Don’t ask me why. It is supposedly an academic thing. Plato taught in a grove of olive trees called Academia. The Lyceum garden was where Aristotle held his classes (hence the French word Lycée), and it is said that enlightenment came to the Buddha and to Isaac Newton under trees. A few years ago I am glad to say Peggy Chin was not sitting under the tree which fell on her nursery in Brickdam, and as far as I am concerned I have often heaved sighs of relief that I have not be trying to solve the world’s problems whilst sitting under the trees in Main Street which have without warning assumed the horizontal position and shed whole limbs on the unwary.
For those of you that possess plants or hedges of bougainvillea, a word or two about their treatment. They will all slow down their growth towards the end of the dry season and that is the time that you should take the secateurs or shears to them. The golden rule is to cut them back before they start to produce new growths in the ‘wet’ and cut them back hard. The new growths that are produced during the ‘rains’ are nearly all going to bear flowers along their entire length, which are a glorious sight. Another golden rule is that when you prune shoots back, the weak shoots should be cut back very hard to stimulate maximum growth, and the stronger shoots should also be cut back, but perhaps not quite so hard as the weaker ones.
Bougainvillea plants should not be fed heavily with either compost or fertilizer. They thrive without much of either. Give them rich food and they will produce a lot of long, strong shoots, and not too much flower. A starvation diet is what they enjoy. It is as though they say to themselves ‘we must produce masses of flower for the seed to help us survive.’ A fanciful thought. Look after your little bit of Eden, and improve it all you can. And if it’s a portable kind of Eden, then put it into the flower show.
