More Garden Jargon

I am going to talk about just three phrases today. The first is ‘dis-budding’. At first this seems self explanitory. Well, not quite. Dis-budding does not mean to take all the buds off a plant. It means to thin them  out in a very particular way. The point of dis-budding is to produce much larger flowers (although fewer of them). It is carried out on a number of plants, mainly Dahlias, Chrsanthemums and Roses. People who show their flowers in flower shows dis-bud to produce that extra large flower to win a prize. However, if you prefer larger flowers to loads of them, there is no reason why you shouldn’t do it also. What you do is to look carefully at the flower buds when they are first produced. You will see that in a number of cases there are three buds close together at the end of a stem. The centre one will be larger than the two side ones. With your finger and thumb nails (or a pair of secateurs) you pinch out the side buds. Do not damage the centre bud. This will make the plant put all its energy into producing a much larger flower than it would have had it been growing three flowers. It is easier to be more accurate with your finger and thumb than using secateurs. The plant material will be very soft and easy to break, so it is necessary to be very careful when you are doing this.

If you want to plant around a trss and it is casting to much shade, or if it is to low to walk comfortably under it, then you may want to cut the branches off.  This is called ‘raising the canopy’. When you thnjk about it, it makes perfect sense but unless you understand the phrase, it is nonsence. When you cut off branches, remember to cut them as close to the trunk as possible. This will prevent ‘die back’ which is when a branch has been cut back and after it dies back to the next junction with the plant. That is why you should always cut back to a leaf or branch (or in this case the trunk). Die back is  bad for a number of reasons. It loks unsighly to have dead branches on your pplant. It also encourages pests and diseases to enter your plant  causing other problems.