Keeping the aspidistra flying

Get your garden act together in 2010 with a few simple routines

I KNOW IT’S A little late on the calendar for making New Year’s resolutions, but gardeners rarely worry about doing things on the exact prescribed days. If it feels right, if the conditions are good, and if you have the time, then do it, we say.

So, without further excuses (yes, that’s a resolution too: stop excuse-making and apologising), I’d like to share with you some of the good intentions I’ve formulated for the new year. I’m pretty sure that some of them are also relevant to my fellow gardeners, because we are such a perennially determined, can-do-better bunch of people.

This year I am going to be more ruthless. I’m going to stop hanging onto tired plants just because I feel sorry for them. All those sad specimens sitting lumpenly in their pots next to the greenhouse – the suffering salvia, the lanky and listless lavatera, the sundry other examples of containerised catalepsy – all are for the compost heap. Most have been sitting on the sidelines for years, a raggle-taggle row of disgruntled substitute players that are never called into action, their talents and expertise long forgotten. Unloved, but tolerated plants such as these bring a forlorn air to a garden, creating little pockets of depression around them. When they are gone you don’t miss them, except to notice that they have left behind a cheerful void.

There is one vintage contender, however, who has been lurking among the wastrels, and whom I will be reviving with a new pot and compost. It is a 31-year-old aspidistra, thrown out of the house four summers ago when it had a bad case of red spider mite. Dry, indoor air provides the preferred atmosphere for the nearly invisible, sap-sucking monsters, so I figured that a month or two of gentle summer rain would put a stop to their eight-legged gallop. We’ll gloss over how I managed to leave the old aspidistra out in the weather (frost and a smattering of snow, as well as tidal waves of rain) for close to five years, but I did. It survived, and the herd of red spider mite perished, or moved on in a fit of pique. The common names of this Japanese native partly explain its ability to withstand the worst insults: cast iron plant and bar room plant. For being the uncomplaining bearer of such names it is well worth saving, but also, because its strange, shy flowers – urn-shaped structures that bloom at ground level – are pollinated by slugs. Talking points such as these fill me with great affection for this hard-chaw houseplant, and I have resolved this year to keep the aspidistra flying.

I’m also going to be sensible in 2010, and stop buying plants just because they look all coy and winning in the garden centre or nursery. Our garden is large, by urban standards, but it’s too small to accommodate every handsome Tom, Dick and Harry that waves at me from the display bench. From now on, each green thing that comes into this patch must have more than one season of interest, or if it has only a single trick, it had better be a truly spectacular one. If a perennial is appealing when in flower, I’ll be looking to see if its foliage is also up to scratch, unless it has a long blooming season, or can produce an upright and sculptural skeleton to decorate the winter garden. Any trees or shrubs that I bring into the fold will have to meet an even more stringent set of demands: I’ll be looking for flowers for the bees, fruits or seeds for the birds, and autumn colour for me.

I’m going to be doubly sensible this year: even if a plant passes the tests above, I’m not going to bring it home unless I know exactly where Im going to put it. Such a course will keep the waiting room outside the greenhouse from filling up with dejected specimens in pots. Needless to say, I’ll also be considering the eventual height and spread of any plant that I bring home or grow from seed or cuttings. (The ruthlessness and forethought around here are going to be mighty.)

This year is also going to be the year of great tidiness. There will be no more disorganised piles of stuff lying about, no more uncoiled hoses or abandoned watering cans, no congregations of unwashed seed trays. I’ll be stopping all big gardening sessions 15 minutes early in order to return the place to a shiny shipshapeliness. This is a practice that I have heard is used on some building sites abroad, and I’m keen to import it into my garden. As for shorter stints of gardening, I’m resolved to have more of them, more often. Some days, it seems that all I do is check the greenhouse, and then disappear indoors to my desk, or out on an assignment. But it is the “little and often” that keeps a garden a vibrant space. Even if I take only a couple of 10-minute breaks a day to root up some bindweed (that’s another resolution: must keep on top of bindweed), or tie in a climber, or pot on some seedlings, or sow another row of salad leaves, it keeps the garden machine ticking over.

In fact, many of my resolutions for this year can be slotted into 10-minute units of time – in the way that the independently rich Hugh Grant in the film About a Boy divided his languid day into segments such as “haircut: 3 units, exercise: 2 units” and so on. Accordingly, some of my resolutions could go something like this: Keeping my tools sharp: 1 unit; deadheading the roses: 1 unit; washing (with soap and water) plant pots immediately they are emptied: 2 units; updating my garden notes: 2 units; labelling newly planted specimens: 0.5 units.

But, as any gardener knows, the business of growing plants and tending the soil is endless. You can portion it, plan it and ponder it – but it still preoccupies our souls in the way that a baby preoccupies its parents. Gardeners are on the job all the time.

So, for my final resolution: this is the year that I will tell myself, yet again, to be thankful that my work and my passion are the same, and that I have my own spot on this planet where I can help the plants grow, where I can be with nature, and where I have good friends who help to keep the whole thing growing.

jpowers@irishtimes.com