1580. The naked gardener

Tresnor liked to garden in the nude. She’d always done it. Her parents gardened in the nude, and since she was a wee toddler Tresnor had followed suit. There was a certain freedom! A oneness with nature! It was healthy! It was what tribal ancestors did eons ago! No one got hurt! It was perfectly harmless!

Only once did Tresnor get scratched, and that was when she was pruning a rose bush and she stepped back into the prickly pear cactus. She scratched the back of her leg, and after that, when she was pruning roses, she always wore long socks.

To be honest, a naked person pruning roses next to a prickly pear and wearing long socks is a sight to behold, but Tresnor didn’t mind. There was no one watching through her high fence.

These days, she is older, but she still gardens in the nude. There are no roses to prune, so the long socks have been dispensed with. And on a coldish day she forgoes gardening altogether. There’s no need really to get chilly unnecessarily. But on a sunny day she’s out there weeding and cutting back even though it wouldn’t matter if the garden got a little overgrown. Besides, the retirement village has a permanent gardener to care for the community garden.

1134. A prickly pruning

Good evening. I’m Shelagh Littenberg, and welcome to Time in the Garden – your weekly foray into the foliage.

Today we’re visiting the fabulous rose gardens of Sir Julius Barton-Klap. Sir Julius has been at the forefront of developing new rose varieties for over thirty years. He has thousands of rose bushes. There would hardly be a rose variety in existence that’s not to be found in Sir Julius Barton-Klap’s all-encompassing garden.

We have so many questions to ask the expert, but today especially we’re going to learn how to prune roses correctly. With so many roses, there can be little doubt that there’s a right and a wrong way, and Sir Julius will put us all on the proper track. Good evening, Sir Julius.

Good evening, Shelagh.

With so many roses, how to you manage to prune them all? And what is the correct way to do it?

Actually, Shelagh, I use the electric hedge clippers. Just shear them down a bit. My wife uses the weed-eater on the bramble bushes. They don’t seem to mind getting cut to the ground. In fact, they like it. It’s a family affair. For some of the more rampant climbers one of my sons gets stuck in with the chain saw. The other son uses a machete; he likes to get a bit of a sweat-up. With so many roses, it’s the only way and they seem to be able to take a thrashing.

But isn’t there a correct way to do it? I was told to always cut on an angle just below where it would bud; and to always have the bud’s position so that it grew out from the rose and not inwards.

Well I suppose if you’ve got one or two plants you could do that, but really just hacking away with the secateurs will do the trick; any old how.

Thank you. Next week we were down to learn how Sir Julius fertilized his roses, but I think we’ll give it a miss and visit the Brassica Nursery to learn the correct and humane way to stop caterpillars from eating your carefully-tended cabbages. That’s something that concerns us all. Good evening.