Free We Made a Garden by Margery Fish Page A

manure is good for some things, but grass cuttings are good for everybody. A thin sprinkling of grass will not get very hot but if you are putting on the cuttings with a liberal hand they should be left until all the heat is out of them before being spread round your pet plants. You have only to feel the heat generated in a heap of fresh grass cuttings to visualize what will happen if fresh cuttings are thickly piled round sensitive plants.
    Such things as raspberries and phlox, which have roots near the surface, dry out very quickly and are most grateful for a comforting blanket of moist grass. Runner beans get a mulch of about a foot deep. It would be a big job to give runner beans enough water to satisfy them, but by syringeing their leaves and giving a generous mulch to their feet they do very well.
    I’d like to mulch the whole garden but as that is impossible I concentrate on the plants that I hope will go on flowering the whole summer. Roses come first, and as I have mostly polyantha type, I do expect them to keep me in colour all through the season. Clematises, if doing well, have a large family to support, so I take good care of them, and remembering the needs of dahlias, I look after them too, but there are only one or two left in the garden, which have survived, in spite of my callous way of leaving them in the ground.
    Of all the mulching materials I think grass and manure are the best because they get dug into the soil and continue to do good.

12. Dahlias
    In addition to roses and clematis Walter had a deep passion for dahlias, the bigger, the brighter and the fleshier the better.
    He bought a large collection from an expert almost as soon as we bought the house, and the first summer they enjoyed a secluded season in front of the hedge that separated us from the next house. There was no other place then in which to grow them, and I thought it was an admirable permanent home for them, a position all to themselves, with a hedge as background, but Walter felt they were being slighted by being put in the background and when I came to plant my terraced garden I was told to leave plenty of large spaces for the dahlias.
    Unfortunately they were never labelled, so I had no idea what colours they were. Walter said they were all so lovely that it didn’t matter. I held other views but was not clever enough to evolve a way of labelling them. I did try but in the process of lifting the tubers, washing the tubers, drying the tubers, dusting with sulphur the tubers and finally burying the tubers in boxes of ashes the chance of any label remaining attached to the tubers was very remote. The consequence was that I got great blobs of the wrong colour in my carefully planned schemes, which did not endear them to me. They were the most flashy collection of dahlias I have seen, only fit for a circus, as I often told my husband.
    When we first started gardening I was only allowed to watch (for future reference) the great ritual of planting dahlias. I think I was permitted to get barrowloads of manure and cans of water, but he would not trust me to do more. In after years, when he could not do the heavy jobs, I had to plant them but he always stood by to see I didn’t cheat.
    Stock Exchange holidays—the 1st of May and 1st of November— were our aim for the ceremonies of planting and lifting the dahlias.
    First of all Walter dug a large and deep hole. He never worried about treading on my plants, or smothering them with the great piles of earth that were thrown up, so I had to be careful not to plant anything within a wide radius. A generous spoonful of manure went into the bottom of the hole, and this was covered with soil. The next job was to ram in an enormous stake which was eventually to support the luxuriant growth of the plant, and then the tuber was lowered reverently into the hole and snuggled up to the stake to make things as easy as possible in after life.
    A little ‘fancy’ soil (I mean for this good compost or a