Free We Made a Garden by Margery Fish Page B

nice potting mixture) was sifted in all round the tuber and then some, but not all, of the earth dug out was put back. Instead of a nice smooth finish there had to be saucer like hollows to catch the moisture that would come from heaven or the watering can. It was no good for me to tell him that it looked as if the cat had been busy, it didn’t matter what my bed looked like so long as each dahlia was given all the comfort that was humanly possible. When he had finished I used to go round removing the surplus earth that was heaped up all round each planting, but I never dared shovel it back into his hollows, as I wanted to do. Some things were sacred.
    Watering the dahlias was one of the things I was supposed to do and often shirked. If ever Walter saw me with a can in my hand, giving refreshment to some little stranger, or preparatory to sowing seeds, I knew I should hear ‘Are you going to water the dahlias?’ I am afraid I got in the habit of doing my watering when he wasn’t about. I wouldn’t have minded if a small amount of water would have sufficed. Nothing less than a whole canful had to be poured slowly down each horrible little hole—and the contents of one can would bring new life to quite a lot of my small treasures.
    Sometimes even the stoutest stake would prove a broken reed and casualties brought gloom into the house. Nowadays, thank goodness, one seldom sees those tall fleshy dahlias, with blooms like soup plates, so heavy that they can hardly hold up their heads. I am glad that the present taste is for less tall, less exuberant dahlias, which are easier to grow and far easier to incorporate into an ordinary garden with pleasant effect.
    The problem has been solved for me because I was never very successful in keeping tubers through the winter. Unlike the cottagers, whose favourite place for storing them is in the spare bedroom, I have only outhouses and they are all cold and draughty places. Under the staging of a greenhouse is a good place, but I have no greenhouse, and however carefully I stored them, tucking them up in mountains of straw, the cold always managed to find them and every season there were a few less, until I was reduced to two very ordinary red ones, a double and a single, and these I leave in the ground. They come up year after year and I am quite glad to see them.

13. Some Failures
    As a gardener I was a great trial to my husband and I marvel now that he was so patient with me. He wanted me to concentrate on the straightforward things like delphiniums and lupins instead of odd things which he thought were not so rewarding. He had little interest in small, unshowy plants that I liked to try, and liked a good return for his money. The only way I could get round this was to keep up the fiction that I did not buy plants and anything new that appeared in the garden had been given to me. It wasn’t that he minded the cost, but he took the line that as I did not look after properly the plants that I had (i.e. didn’t water the dahlias enough) it was silly to keep getting more plants.
    Every gardener knows the fascination of the unknown, and when the ordinary plants are doing nicely there is a great temptation to be a little more venturesome. That is one of the excitements of gardening, but one which my husband did not share. He pretended not to see me with my nose in catalogues night after night, and though I always tried to intercept the postman when I was expecting plants, he always knew.
    On the whole I agreed with him that it was silly to try to make things grow that obviously don’t like you, certainly not if your soil is wrong for them. But there are some plants that are naturally capricious and unpredictable and it becomes a personal challenge to succeed with them. One such plant is Scotch creeper, or Tropaeolum speciosum , to give it its proper name. I knew it could be grown in this part of the world because for several of my friends it ramped away without restraint. But it just