According to my Mum, the difference between a good haircut and a bad one was "two weeks". Mum was entirely wrong about his, as was her belief that you didn't need to read the "method" in a recipe. Just bung in all the ingredients and cook.
The latter led to the infamous meringue disaster of 1960, which produced flat splodges that my brother and I stretched all the way from the kitchen to the bedroom and that I hid under the table at "bring a plate of cakes to school day".
Mum's continued belief in both assertions, despite years of evidence to the contrary, makes me hesitant to share my own "easy gardening" philosophy: you can cut back just about anything with a whipper-snipper.
I very rarely promote commercial products. Plants have grown without human assistance for most of plant history, and gardeners produced food and beauty without garden centres for tens of thousands of years, and still can. Save seeds, take cuttings, divide clumps, compost and turn leftover lasagne into plant food with chooks and you won't need cash.
But I love our whipper-snipper. Years ago I was given the tip about mowing or "snipping" down every hellebore once the flowers died back. This removes the old leaves, prone to thrip attack which cause black spots and depressing foliage, and allows the new leaves which spring up to shine.
I've since followed the same technique for our 20 of so kinds of salvia - whipper-snip the lot back almost to ground level. They look as ugly as a bad haircut for about three weeks, then suddenly you have a neat mound of new growth, which given water - or even without it for a well-established clump - will bloom prolifically. This works for both low, medium and tall salvias.
I now do the same for dahlias in early winter, ginger lilies in spring, and have even applied a modified technique at the end of the flowering season for perennials like penstemon, yarrow etc. DON'T cut these to the ground, but shave off the tops in a bad haircut. You can tell the difference, but not by much, and you've spent 30 seconds instead of three hours trimming.
I now use the whipper-snipper in various rash and nefarious ways. The snipper string can be used to cut into unwanted patches of violets so deeply they won't regrow, or (almost) neatly edge paths and paving. Used with enormous care and only with a steady hand, you can "summer prune" dead flowers from roses, callistemons et al. The blade attachment will prune off small branches, dead fern and palm fronds, and stop the kiwi fruit vine from invading the bedroom.
There is one major proviso - the machine is fast and powerful. Give it a fraction of a second too long, or in the wrong place, and you may lose the entire plant, or worse, nick the main trunk so that fungus invades and slowly kills your shrub or tree.
The danger of over-enthusiastic whipper-snipping - or mowing - is one of the reasons why I grow non-invasive, sterile varieties of agapanthus around each tree and shrub. The aggies protect stems and trunks from mowing injury, and well as harbouring snails, so you only need one target for "search and destroy" missions to keep your garden reasonably snail free. (Blue tongue lizards and kookaburras are also excellent sail exterminators).
I won't say our garden is neater because of whipper-snipping. Our garden is never neat. But it does mean we have a garden, not a jungle - and far more time to enjoy it.
This week I am:
- Watching the English oaks turn from brown branches to bright green leaves overnight.
- Harvesting enough wild bird droppings with a bird bath and feeder to fertilise a cumquat tree, four camellias and six finger limes. The bird seeds costs little. In return we get droppings from food ingested far beyond our garden, as well as endless entertainment as the birds somersault, preen and squabble.
- Picking daffodils, hellebores in 14 shapes and colours, Green Goddess lilies, broccolini, sliverbeet, carrots, spinach, celery, asparagus, avocadoes, finger limes, early peppermint and lemon verbena, and wishing others would come to share the oranges, lemons, cumquats, citrons, Tahitian limes, tamarillos, tiny seed-filled mandarins, rhubarb, while admiring the michela and camelia flowers and the only azalea to - somehow - escape from being munched by wallabies.
- Deciding that our 'minimum' vegie garden this year will be self-sown carrots, tomatoes and parsley, plus silverbeet, celery, cucumbers and a very few lettuce, as most lettuce varieties turn bitter or go to seed if they get too hot or too dry, even for a few days.
- Reminding myself yet again that a tree full of cherry blossom does not mean bowls full of cherries. Blossoms may not set, and the birds will almost certainly get most of the fruit before I do.
- Pruning back the date palm so we can pick the dates. To my surprise date palms (male and female) not only grow in our climate, but fruit after a decade or so - grow only if you have the space.
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