A Green and Pleasant Land

by Ursula Buchan

  However, despite the dearth of suitable weedkillers, the authorities were very firm about the importance of keeping vegetable gardens well weeded, not only so that weeds did not take nutriments needed by crops,15 but also so that neighbouring gardens would not be plagued by perennial weeds coming through under the fence or hedge. Even owners who had evacuated their premises were not exempt from the duty of keeping their gardens ‘clean’. Puzzlingly, though there were ‘Dig for Victory’ leaflets on everything from the use of cloches to saving seeds, there was never one on weeds and weeding, although these were aspects of vegetable growing that will have preoccupied Victory Diggers more than most.

  Gardeners, then as now, would have been hard pressed to decide which were the greater enemies to their vegetables and fruit – weeds or pests and diseases. In 1926, Vita Sackville-West had published a long poem called The Land, which included a stanza about the ills to which fruit trees are heir:

  ‘Look, too, to your orchards in the early spring.

  The blossom-weevil bores into the sheath,

  Grubs tunnel in the pith of promising shoots,

  The root-louse spends his winter tucked beneath

  Rough bark of trunks or chinks of tangled roots;

  Canker, rot, scab, and mildew blight the tree;

  There seems an enemy in everything.’16

  As an accomplished and experienced gardener and small farmer, Sackville-West knew perfectly well how hopes of a fine fruit harvest could be dashed in many diverse ways. And it was true of vegetable crops as well. It is small wonder that the Ministry of Agriculture’s pamphlets and posters seemed so concerned about pests and diseases. Cabbage white butterfly caterpillars, slugs, wireworms, leatherjackets, greenfly, whitefly, potato blight, onion fly: they made up a seemingly endless litany of ills that needed instant attention, and usually dispatch by the use of some noxious chemical or time-honoured, time-consuming folksy remedy. The second ‘Growmore’ bulletin was entitled ‘Pests and Diseases in the Vegetable Garden’, and on the front was an illustration of a man with a knapsack sprayer, carrying a lance in his hand and spraying cabbages. The message was clear: if you wanted to be successful, you needed to use chemical pesticides.

  Information about pests and diseases was very often couched in militaristic language: it was a war out there, and either you killed the pests or they blitzed all your efforts. Because the pendulum has swung so far the other way in the last thirty years, and gardeners refrain from using pesticides unless driven to distraction, and sometimes not even then, it is hard for us to imagine how necessary, if dreary, all this sounded. Gardeners then did not know what we know now: that many of the pesticides they used so blithely, often without any kind of protective clothing, were potentially harmful not only to wild and domesticated creatures but to the user as well. The way the gardening press welcomed DDT when it came on the market in 1944 strikes fear into our hearts now. Nor must we forget that, in the intervening period, much work has been done to breed vegetable cultivars with at least some resistance to damage by pests and diseases, so that many are not as vulnerable as varieties available in the 1940s.

  The war accelerated the introduction of a number of synthetic chemical pesticides, as well as DDT, in particular dieldrin, aldrin and malathion. Interestingly, so effective was dieldrin against glasshouse whitefly that the biological control Encarsia formosa, which had been introduced to both amateur and professional greenhouses in the 1920s and 30s, was widely abandoned in wartime.17 The flower decorator Constance Spry had been an enthusiastic devotee, but she was not typical. In 1942 she wrote:

  Most people who grow tomatoes under glass know all about the white fly scourge. We were very badly attacked by this and tried a good many remedies without great success until we used a white fly parasite, which we got from the Experimental and Research Station at Cheshunt, Herts. I must say when the little bunches of dried-up leaves arrived, I looked at them with a doubting eye, and it was some time before I could appreciate the potency of their work.’18

  The efficacy of Encarsia was rediscovered in the 1970s, and the parasite is now widely used as a benign biological control in both commercial and amateur glasshouses.

  William Lawrence, who was Gardens Curator at the horticultural science establishment, the John Innes Horticultural Institution, wrote on the subject of available pesticides in wartime:

  The most fearsome of our weapons was cyanide. Bowls of sulphuric acid would be placed along the length of the [green] house and weighed amounts of potassium cyanide in screws of tissue paper dropped into the acid, one by one, while the operator beat a hasty retreat before the acid ate through the paper! The cyanide fumes of course were deadly to humans and doors had to be tied up so that no one could enter the house before next day.’19

  Lawrence’s cyanide was almost certainly only available to professional gardeners, but the experts recommended plenty of other toxic chemicals for amateur gardeners to use. Against clubroot, for example, they advised ‘corrosive sublimate’, in other words 4 per cent calomel dust or mercuric chloride. This had once been a treatment for syphilis. Even The Gardeners’ Chronicle admitted that ‘It is a deadly poison to man and beast as well as to the pest [clubroot] and, if used, gloves should be worn, and an earthenware pot or jug used to mix it in. A very weak solution20 will suffice.’21 It is a relief to know that gardeners were encouraged to wear gloves at least. Even C.H. Middleton, who seems to modern readers shockingly cavalier in his attitude to poisonous chemicals, advised his listeners to be careful with it.

  Lead arsenate paste was used to kill sucking insects on fruit trees, despite the fact that it was poisonous to honeybees, as indeed were a number of other insecticides. When buying lead arsenate in the chemist’s shop, customers had to sign a poisons book, or a special form if ordering from a sundries catalogue. That was also true of nicotine products.

  Wartime gardeners were lucky that tar oil winter washes had appeared on the market in the 1930s, for, when sprayed on fruit trees, these effectively ‘spring-cleaned’ them of pests. Derived from creosote, this chemical was not particularly toxic to humans, but care had to be taken not to splash it on the grass below, because it killed green growth so effectively. Mortegg was the proprietary brand, which everybody used. It was advertised in the newspapers as if it were a government announcement: ‘Ministry of Mortegg Information. Mortegg tar oil winter wash is your Maginot Line against insect pests on fruit trees.’

  The most commonly used glasshouse pesticide in the 1940s was nicotine, derived from the tobacco plant. Nicotine was particularly effective against greenfly and whitefly. It could be bought as a powder, added to water in a bucket and sprayed on to plants using the household stirrup pump kept as a precaution for use against incendiary bombs. Professional gardeners, with larger areas to spray, used heavy metal knapsack sprayers. Those gardeners who did not want to pay for proprietary nicotine simply soaked old cigarette butts in water with a little soft soap, and then sprayed the resulting dark brown liquid.

  Outside the greenhouse, the great enemy of promise in the vegetable garden was the slug, especially destructive on salad plants. At the beginning of the war they were poisoned with metaldehyde, although the increasing shortage of bran – in which it was mixed – meant that supplies became progressively harder to find. Instead, the full panoply of traditional remedies was employed, from sunken containers with a little beer in the bottom, to upside-down eaten halves of oranges – when they were available – to planks smeared with jam and laid on the soil.

  As for cabbage caterpillars, derris powder, from the derris root, was the great standby for anyone who did not want the laborious and horrible job of picking them off the leaves by hand and drowning them. Derris also dispatched flea beetles, which chewed pieces out of seedlings, especially those of brassicas. Unfortunately, the supply dried up after the Japanese invaded Malaya. Even more unfortunately, its place was taken by a newly developed, highly toxic organochlorine called HCH, marketed as Lindane.

&
nbsp; The very common pest, carrot fly, was discouraged by stringing a line painted with creosote above the carrot row, on the basis that the smell would mask the scent of carrot leaf and the flies would not land and lay their eggs. This stratagem relied on an accurate knowledge of the ways of this insect, but it made up for the fact that there was no suitable soil insecticide available.

  Underground, the eelworm or nematode, a microscopic soil-dwelling organism, was particularly troublesome to vegetable gardeners. Few of them had the space to rotate their crops sufficiently for nematodes to die out for want of a suitable host. Nematodes, especially potato eelworm, spread through allotment sites very quickly, as a result of the allotmenteer’s habit of saving a few tubers from year to year rather than buying fresh ‘seed’, since it was so scarce. The government encouraged gardeners to buy ‘certificated’ seed potatoes, but these were not always easy to acquire in wartime. Almost all potato ‘seed’ was grown in Scotland because the cooler climate there discouraged aphids, which carried virus diseases. However, long-distance transport difficulties meant that seed potatoes were often unavailable in late winter when gardeners wanted them for ‘chitting’. This was particularly the case in early 1941.

  Potatoes could also be ravaged by wireworms, which, along with leatherjackets, were the two most serious pests of newly dug lawn or grassland, of which there was a great deal early in the war. The former is the larval stage of the click beetle, the latter of the crane fly or ‘daddy-long-legs’. Wireworms burrow into potato tubers and carrot roots, and also attack tomato plants, while leatherjackets eat the stems of lettuces and other leaf vegetables at ground level, causing them to wilt and die. The chemist’s remedy for wireworms was ‘whizzed’ or powdered naphthalene, which is the active ingredient in old-fashioned mothballs. C. H. Middleton himself recommended it as a remedy in both columns and advertisements that appeared in the Daily Express.

  In the 1940s, the non-chemical way of dealing with these pests was to sow a mustard crop and then dig it in. The mustard smelled unpleasant to wireworms, and the leafy crop helped feed the soil. Alternatively, if the gardener did not mind an arduous task, he could bury half a potato stuck on a stick in the ground. Every few days he would have to pull up the stick and dispatch any wireworms. Equally laborious was the remedy for getting rid of leatherjackets: if they killed a plant, a gardener would have to stab the ground in a circle around the plant with a sharp knife.

  One imported pest about which most people had heard, but which they were not adept at identifying, was the Colorado beetle. These aliens unnerved farmers and gardeners alike, since they could completely destroy a potato crop in very quick time, and they had become well established in northern France. After the war, a story emerged of how the Germans dropped boxes filled with Colorado beetles over the Isle of Wight. According to a retired British Museum entomologist, Richard Ford, who told the story to the newspapers in the 1970s, the Germans had first dropped these beetles near the village of Chale in 1943. This fact had been kept ‘hush-hush’ at the time so as not to alarm the public. Ford recruited bands of evacuated schoolchildren, swore them to secrecy and sent them out into the fields to catch the beetles.

  It was my duty to destroy them immediately, so I plunged them into boiling water. I still possess a few dried-up specimens as souvenirs.

  The bombs were, in fact, rather crude cardboard containers, and I believe the Germans, because of their Teutonic precision, made a big practical error in their approach. We discovered that they dropped the beetles in groups of either 100 or 50, so our beetle hunters knew how many they had to seek out and destroy to overcome any particular attack.22

  How those children must have enjoyed themselves.

  As far as plant diseases were concerned, potato blight was the one that most frightened gardeners, whether they had studied Irish history or not. Potato blight affects first the leaves and then the tubers of potatoes in late summer, especially if the weather is warm and wet. Blight also infects tomatoes, since they are closely related to potatoes. So important was the control of potato blight on allotments that the Ministry produced a ‘Dig for Victory’23 leaflet specifically to teach gardeners how to make Bordeaux mixture and Burgundy mixture, sprays that could be used as prophylactics. These fungicides had originally been developed in France for use on grapevines: the first is copper sulphate mixed with water and dissolved hydrated lime, and the second is copper sulphate mixed with dissolved washing soda. These sprays had to be made up in a bucket and the strength tested by dipping a knife blade in the solution. If the blade darkened in colour, more quicklime or washing soda solution was required.

  Not so harmful to humans or wildlife as many of the recommended chemical solutions, but nevertheless unpleasant if you were allergic to it, was ‘flowers of sulphur’, a powder that was the most common remedy against the fungal disease powdery mildew. Dorothy Pembridge, a land girl working at Madresfield24 for the Earl and Countess Beauchamp, developed a rash on her neck from cleaning the grapevine in winter because she had to untie the treated rods and lay them against her neck as she worked on them.25

  Assiduous readers of government information, and those who bothered to attend talks or Brains Trusts given by professional gardeners, would have been left with the distinct impression that gardening was a very hard grind, resulting after much labour in the production of some pretty dull vegetables. Let us hope that at least some of them read the writings of Constance Spry, for these would surely have lifted their spirits:

  There are scoffers who find truly comic eccentricity in the consideration of beauty in what they call common vegetables. These are suffering from blindness caused by familiarity. Even the most hilarious mocker would have been compelled to stop laughing to admire a certain long border of dark green curly kale that I saw lately in a grey-walled garden. I came on it suddenly and stopped dead; the plants were more imposing than Victorian funeral plumes, and as covered with delicate bloom as a bunch of hothouse grapes. The bloom and curl of the leaves gave an illusion of softest velvet.’26

  Not many people could have expressed themselves like that, but those who persevered in vegetable gardening at least found that the practice was often a great deal more pleasant than the theory. Indeed, there are many accounts of gardeners finding the process surprisingly fun and companionable and the results of their labours satisfying and nearly always a source of pride. A female allotmenteer from Bedfordshire recalled after the war that ‘I was so proud of my achievement when I cycled home with baskets of fresh vegetables and fruit and occasional bunches of flowers.’27

  CHAPTER SIX

  TALKING OF SCARLET-VEINÈD BEET

  On a Wireless Set

  Who is this coming to the microphone?

  Is it the man again to cast his jest

  New-minted on the garrulous unknown?

  What sailor comes to answer our request?

  What fair economist? What little street

  Is emptied of its Joad1 this brain-sick hour

  To prate of Plato old or Socrates?

  What gardener talks of scarlet-veinèd beet,

  Of onions, or the clotted cauliflower,

  Or sounds the praise of upward-climbing peas?2

  THE ANSWER, OF course, to the last question was Mr Middleton, presenter of the weekly radio programme In Your Garden, and the most famous wartime broadcaster on gardening.

  Cecil Henry Middleton was born in 1886, at Weston-by-Weedon in Northamptonshire, the son of Sir George Sitwell’s head gardener at Weston Hall. He was much of an age with Sitwell’s three extraordinary children, Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, and almost certainly played with them as a boy, since his father, although an employee, would have enjoyed a considerable status on the estate. Sir George Sitwell was an avid garden maker, both in England and Italy, and published a well-regarded book on design, On the Making of Gardens, in 1909.3

  Middleton began his working life, aged thirteen, as a garden boy in the Weston Hall garden, but at seventeen, with only fift
y shillings in his pocket, he left home for London. He found work with a seed firm, then took up a place as a student gardener at Kew. By 1912, he was married and already working as a teacher of horticulture. During the First World War, he worked in the horticultural division of the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, the forerunner of the Ministry of Agriculture. He gained the National Diploma of Horticulture, the highest RHS qualification, and then joined Surrey County Council as an instructor. It is certain that the Director of Wisley, Frederick Chittenden, who wrote gardening bulletins for the BBC, would have known him personally, since they lived and worked in the same county. As we saw in Chapter One, it was Chittenden who recommended Middleton to the BBC in 1931 as a potential presenter of gardening programmes.

  In Your Garden was originally broadcast at ten past seven on a Friday evening, but when, in October 1936, a move to two o’clock on Sunday afternoons was mooted, Middleton asked the listeners themselves what was best: ‘There does not seem a better way of finding out what your wishes are, whether you regard me as a stimulation for the weekend’s gardening, or to send you off to sleep after Sunday lunch. The BBC want to please you and I am quite prepared to do what I’m told as far as I can and to give you what you want.’4 The answer from the listeners, who wrote in their thousands, was more than two to one in favour of Sunday, and he did what he was told.

  The show consisted principally of Middleton talking to the audience, although he would sometimes invite in another gardening expert for a conversation. People began to think of him as their kindly, knowledgeable, understanding gardening friend from the rural Midlands, in much the same way that a later generation considered Geoff Hamilton. In 1935, the critic Wilfrid Rooke Ley wrote: ‘It is the art of Mr Middleton to address himself to the lowest common denominator of horticultural intelligence without the faintest hint of superiority or condescension. He will assume that your soil is poor, and your pocket poor. All he asks is that your hopes are high and your Saturday afternoons at his service . . . He has the prettiest humour. He stands for common sense and has the gift of consolation.’5 Such a valuable gift was to prove very attractive to his listeners in wartime.