Day 37 - Pass the wrench

'Do you wrench your roses?' I jumped. Hadn't seen him creeping up on me from where I was in the border inspecting the debilitated shrubs for black spots, rust and mildew. 'Wrench?' I gasped incredulously. 'Yes, I knew an old gardener once who swore by it. On poor soils roses need their roots stimulating, so he'd go round every autumn with a garden fork, driving it in at the base of each one, and forcing for all he was worth till all the roots snapped.' 'And that helps how?' I mused, trying to keep a straight face. 'Well, by breaking the roots, it stimulates new vigorous ones to regrow, and makes the plant stronger.' 'Oh, I'll have to try that,' I said, with no intention whatsoever of doing so. What was he thinking? I know root pruning is an essential part of bonsai training, and it does stimulate new fibrous root growth, but it is accompanied by unfeasible amounts of coddling, feeding and watering to compensate for the insult that has been perpetrated on the plant's vascular system. Just smashing up a shrub rose's life support mechanism and walking away is not going to cut it. It's going to kill it. Or seriously set it back, at any rate. The answer, if you want to stimulate your tired old plants, is to give them plenty of compost, food and water. Roses like lots of all three. And it was the absence of these in our thin chalk soil that was laying them low. That and the fatigue of old age.

But there we have it. Old-fashioned garden wisdoms are not to be relied on. In gardening there are not just three wise men out there. There are hundreds of thousands. Everybody has a glib phrase or some smart-arse knowledge backed by oral tradition. They know things that their father told them their grandfather said about how great-grandad used to swear by this trick his father would use. Or there are the types who have read all the books, and stand in their gardens, or worse still, kneel, in their pristine, unsullied gardening gloves, and theorise at their plants, hoping they'll just give in. It certainly makes me feel like giving up. Pay them no mind, any of them. It's all just mythology, handed down from half-man, half-beasts in horned helmets who were just guessing, or written up by academics who have never had soil under their fingernails. (I know - I am being unfair to the genuine guys here,but as a general pointer, question everything you hear, because most of it is inflated bluster. Then question it again).

For example, I'm sick of people who tell me they 'like to keep the hoe moving', that it acts like a mulch and is as good as a drenching to your drought-stricken herbage. Bollocks. If your plants need a drenching, give them one. Running around with a hoe will only expose damper soil to the air, ensuring more evaporation, not less. Besides, the way most people use a hoe is next to useless. I will have plenty more to say about that later, and about kneeling.

Anyway, we struggled on for ten years with our exhausted old roses, until a lucky break came my way. With a change of staff, not only did we lose all the infectious long-standing disgruntlement that had been passed down over the years as a reaction to my iconoclastic behaviour, but we also gained a rose man on the team. In his first days with us, he astounded me by identifying the roses we had propagated, just by looking at leafless stems in the ground, and I knew I had found the person who could sort out this mess for us. He would also prune the roses according to their classification, I was sure, rather than using my blanket with which I covered all eventualities, with reasonable success, I must admit.

This worked well for the best part of five years, by which time we had secured the funding and the approval to replace the main shrub rose border. I turned the design of this over to him, and he drew up a marvellous plan which I still have a copy of. It was then just a question of digging everything out, double-digging and incorporating copious quantities of organic matter (in quantities far greater than most of you are probably imagining) and planting new roses dipped in mycorrhizal fungi to encourage establishment in soil which had already had half a century of roses stripping it of all its goodies.

He's a marvellous man. You've seen him before. He's Head Gardener now.

There were also tall steel frames to be sited to carry climbers to impart height to the area. Sadly, I left before this planting came to maturity, and I have no photographic evidence beyond the early planted stage below.

I am hoping the boys will send me some photographs of how it looks this year, twelve years on from that. Please? I will put them up here, even if the blog has gone on somewhere completely different by then. Or perhaps you have got some of recent years, showing it at its best? I'd love to see some, and post them on tomorrow's blog!

As for the man in the yellow wellies, he's been there longer than I was. Given that I believe firmly that the experience we have of a garden comes from the influence of its current team, it's clear who now holds the bragging rights!