Page 23 - feb21

Mimi’s secret garden patch

With the blue skies peeping through clouds and the cou cou of the doves that sit regularly
on our roof competing with the ducks from the dam across the road, I can almost feel the
cooler weather of Autumn on its way.

Here we have had good rains, and I’ve been busy trimming nasturtiums so that they fall where
I want them to go and at the end of last Winter I dug up a red rose bush that was definitely
telling me it was in the wrong spot. Not expecting much, I hauled it out of the ground and put
it right in the sun in a pot and gave it lots of water. Suddenly this rose started sending out little
leaves and before I knew it, there were 5 gorgeous big red roses. They had a very light scent,
but it was the reward of moving it to the correct place that was so gratifying.

For the first time I bought a couple of packets of sweet peas and planted them in one of
my designated veggie beds. I tried planting them in little pots towards the end of last year and it
was very disappointing. This year, the whole veggie bed is so full of sweet peas that I had a
problem putting in high enough canes to hold them up. I know that experienced gardeners
say that trenches are the way to go for sweet peas – but I scattered them around with a light
covering of soil and hey presto – I’ve never seen seeds germinate so quickly. I’ve seen that
it’s important that they receive a good amount of sun but not so hot as on your stoop that
gets full sun most of the day as it burns the leaves. The smell of sweet peas is unbelievable
and their fresh blooms are unbeatable in the house. Petunias are another flower I love to
have in my garden, they do very well so long as they are gently watered on a regular basis. It
is, however, only the blue-purple large flowers that produce the most wonderful scent that
launches itself across the pathways as I check out the garden.
What I have taken to doing, before Summer turns the little green plants into a woody affair,
is to pick a nice bunch of flowering thyme. I put it inside the house on a tray in the sun to
dry out over a period of 2 months or so and when ready, I put the thyme into a grinder (a
coffee grinder is fine) and extract all the little undesirable bits. This special herb is so useful
to have handy in the kitchen, to use as a general pick me up in almost any recipe. The smell
is so much more intense than the bottles from the supermarket and this same method can be
also used successfully with basil and sage.

I found a verse by Octavio Paz that I really liked: “ A garden is not a place: /It is a passage /
A passion. /We don’t know where we’re going /To pass through is to Remain.”

Basel Botanical Gardens, by S.C
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