Growing gains

I STILL cannot use my thumbs when potting up a rooted cutting or potting on a plant. I use my fingers. They are better at gauging the pressure needed to firm the compost, be it peat-free (lightness of touch is important) or soil-based (a little firmer). It is not something I learned from a book.

- By Alan Titchmarsh

This is a gardening skill based on feel and that can only be learned first hand (no pun intended), being shown the technique by someone who learnt it from someone else and then passed it on.

I was instructed on how to take a cutting, how to encourage it to form roots, how to plant a tree, sow a seed and myriad other growing techniques at the age of 15 when I went to earn my living in a nursery. I attended day-release classes and read books, but the key practical skills I needed as a gardener were learnt on the earth and at the potting bench in the company of experienced hands who, in their turn, had learned from those skilled gardeners who had gone before.

Watch a skilled grower and you can see evidence of a kind of ‘slapdash love’, as Laurie Lee called it when referring to his mother’s way of gardening. It is an ease with plants; a way of handling them that comes with confidence and experience, of trial and error refined over the centuries. Such horny-handed sons and daughters of the soil are possessed of valuable skills that, if not handed down, will perish with them.