Among the garden books I inherited from the wonderful Scott Siekman, the previous owner of our farm, is a slim paperback titled “Old Wives’ Lore for Gardeners”. It’s an odd little book, full of very unscientific advice, unsubstantiated rumor, and sometimes shocking innuendo. Slyly written by Maureen and Bridget Boland, it opens with this caveat: “We are not Old Wives ourselves, being in fact old spinsters; nor are we professional gardeners in any sense. We collected the tips in this book because we needed them.”
For example, did you know:
Pine needles mulched around strawberry plants will improve their flavor.
Banana peels buried around roses improves their bloom.
Same with tea leaves spread around camellias.
Cats who roll in catmint or alpines can be scared off by placing a length of a bicycle inner tube in the bed, which the cats will think is a snake.
Foxgloves added to a flower arrangement will lengthen its life.
Bury any old leather thing — worn-out boots, solo gloves, your bachelor sofa — in the garden for a nutrient rich injection.
Horsehair rope tied around the trunk of trees is a slug deterrent. Apparently they impale themselves on the sharp fibers and die a painful death.
Some of the advice is simply wrong. But perhaps with a grain of truth, like this passage on pests:
A member of the panel of the BBC’s admirable Gardeners’ Question Time programme, speaking of identifying small creatures in the garden, said that as a lad, he was told: ‘If it moves slowly enough, step on it; if it doesn’t, leave it — it’ll probably kill something else.’
The Boland Spinsters have much to say about composting in an entire chapter titled “Waste Not”. My husband has been an avid food composter for some time, saving up table scraps in a resealable Fleet Farm bucket. He and all our children are also voracious coffee drinkers, to which the Bolands advise:
Coffee grounds scattered on the heap in the ordinary way seemed of no interest to the animals, grounds thrown there in the little paper cones used in Melitta coffee filters were always carefully extracted and the paper, cleaned out, scattered far and wide. We blamed the foxes on general principle. We had the impression that they said to each other “Let’s go up to the farm for a chicken dinner and then down to the Bolands for coffee”, but a zoologist tells us we imagined the whole thing.
The book is also delightful in the utter Englishness of its sense of humor. In a section on plants that “get along with each other” and those that misbehave like children, the Bolands noted:
‘If an oak be set near unto a walnut tree it will not live’. This we have on authority of a translation of Pliny by Philemon Holland, Doctor of Physicke, 1601, and alas it is not clear from this version whether it is the oak or the walnut that will die. We have not, by some mischance, the Latin by us; but frankly we doubt whether we should achieve any more specific agreement of the pronoun than the good Doctor’s.
They stumbled upon a method for improving their rose bushes when they disposed of some kind of greasy build-up in their plumbing by burying it under cover of darkness in the garden bed. Other old wives confirmed that before planting roses, add some drippings of animal fat to the bottom of the hole. (I might try this with the bacon grease that inexplicably gets saved around here.) And being British, the sisters can’t help giving advice while simultaneously taking jabs at the French:
We once read of a family in France who were said to bury the unwanted babies of maidens in the villagery under their vines, presumably on the same principle. but let it not be said that we actually advocate this.
Well bibbity-bop by Jove, and they meant it to sting no doubt!
Old Wives’ Lore for Gardeners is available in its original 1976 printing via Amazon and other booksellers. Beware though that the newer version, reissued in 1999, does not contain the reference to unwanted babies. A publisher somewhere deemed it inappropriate for modern sensibilities. I shall let you be the judge on which version of the book you would prefer.
Photo by Eco Warrior Princess on Unsplash