Talk to your plants

At the time of writing this article I am in England. To be more precise I am in Manchester, the city where I was born and raised. In my formative days Manchester was not a lovely place. The buildings – often magnificent – were dark and had generations of filth embedded into them. God forbid Georgetown ever becomes so polluted.

Whilst I was away in Africa and South America, Manchester was transformed by the introduction of ‘smokeless’ fuel coupled with a rigorous programme of cleaning up the buildings. It was a massive job which has now been more or less completed. The city itself is a pleasure to look at, and so are the flowers.

In my childhood Manchester prided itself on its trees and flowers, and spent a great deal of the money collected from rates and taxes on establishing parks and gardens, and employing and training the staff to do this.

I now have very few relatives living in Manchester, and its main attraction for me and the reason I am now here lies in a district call Old Trafford. To the north of the borough of Old Trafford is the home of Manchester United football club, and to the south of the borough is the Lancashire County Cricket Club. At the time I am writing England is beginning to look forward to another series against ‘the old enemy,’ a name affectionately applied to Australia, for what reason I know not. The next series will be in Australia where grounds will be filled with fanatics who will have travelled to Australia especially for this special series.

On this visit I have spent most of my spare time looking round gardens, and local authority flower displays, and I was pleasantly surprised to see many plants now being grown in what I call sub-tropical plant displays. None of this would have been possible in the pollution of my childhood and youth.

Now they include plants from all over the world: bowstring hemps (Sansevierias), aloes of many kinds, a wide range of succulents, and many palms. In my childhood I never remember the temperatures getting as hot as in Guyana, but in the last year this has been a frequent occurrence, and the question most often asked is whether this is due to climate change, or whether it’s all a question of the atmosphere being freed of so much pollution. My view is that it has a lot to do with sunlight getting through.

When I was at secondary school I remember an extremely enthusiastic biology master who really found it a bit difficult to get the nuts and bolts of his subject across to his students. They really found it difficult to grasp the significance of the work of an Austrian monk called Gregor Mendel. I always thought that he must have been a bit mad in those days. Quite the opposite in fact, for he really was the founder of the science of plant breeding we now call genetics, and at every opportunity everybody should raise their glasses to him. I have a short note in my records that I mentioned the similarity of Mendel’s works in relation to a Polish Jesuit, Brother Stephan, who has been putting into practice the work of Gregor Mendel. Brother Stephan has registered 84 odd varieties of Day Lily (Hemerocallis) and a couple of dozen clematis. He claims that his success is due to the fact that he talked to his plants like children. I have dear Jesuit friends here with whom I have sadly lost touch, but life is a bit like that. Nevertheless we should never give up. And that includes talking to your plants, and on this note may your God go with you.