ESCALLONIA CUTTINGS -- FRUIT BUSHES -- PRUNING: Saturday 30 November 2002
MC e-mails about her Escallonia, a flowering shrub much favoured by the gardeners of Cornwall for its resistance to salt and wind.
She says: "My problem was that I was pruning an Escallonia shrub at the proper moon time -- I think. I then wanted to try propagating some of my cuttings. However, I thought that according to the moon calendar the correct time for this was not until two weeks further on. What should I do with my cuttings until then? In the end, I stood them in water and then planted them at the later date. What should I have done. Are shrubs treated differently from vegetables?"
R J Harris's response is: "Go to page 118 in the manual and start at instruction 1. The full answer is there, and more." (See the link at the foot of the page.)
Pages 118 to 121 deal with FRUIT BUSH/3. This is one of manual's five sections telling the whole of the R J Harris moon-oriented, fruit-bush story. He points MC to this information because the pruning of an established fruit bush with the aim of securing cuttings for propagation is carried out in exactly the same way -- so far as method and moon timings are concerned -- as taking the secateurs to an Escallonia for the same reason.
Two minor differences are
1) the Escallonia is an evergreen plant, so it is wise to site its cuttings in pots, not in a nursery bed (this is best done the moment they leave the parent shrub), and
2) the time to do this is either Autumn, before frost clamps down, or early Spring, when frost has disappeared.
The Autumn-potted cuttings can be shifted to a cold frame or a cold greenhouse should the weather become too beastly during the Winter. The evergreen cutting, the head gardener points out, takes longer to begin its root system, and so needs extra protection against Nature's Winter worst. The difficulty does not arise in respect of the early-Spring evergreen cutting, because all of the good things of Summer await it as it sits in its pot.
An interesting feature: the moon has no influence upon when the evergreen cutting is potted. This is because no connection exists between the medium that is in the pot and the water table that lies beneath the garden soil.
The head gardener's answer to MC's question demonstrates the unchallengeable logic of moon gardening.
The shrub that is not an evergreen -- no matter what its role in the garden -- is best pruned after leaf drop, before frost arrival and at the end of the prevailing moon's fourth quarter. Further, a cutting that results from this process is best inserted into its nursery bed at the start of the following moon's first quarter.
For practical purposes, there is no gap between these two points in time. They are one and the same thing. And the hours linking shrub pruning and cuttings' insertion are the very hours during which Earth's water table has dropped to its lowest level and is beginning to lift itself once again -- thanks to the performace of the moon's gravitational pull.
The overall beneficial result is
1) the reduced upward pressure of the water table exerts the least pressure upon the shrub's roots, causing the least amount of sap loss and resultant plant trauma as the secateurs do their job, and
2) the moisture content of the top soil into which the secateured cuttings are immediately inserted begins to be increased by the then increasing upward thrust of the rising water table. During the following two weeks, roughly, as the moon's pull steadily increases, that moisture content goes on increasing -- and this at the very time that the newly-inserted cuttings most need moisture in order to commence root formation.
Be it said (and R J Harris says it often), all of this -- and of the total methodology that is moon gardening -- can be ignored and, still, generally acceptable results can be achieved. There is a loss, however. Moon gardening's extremely helpful disciplines regarding calendar dates and the correlation of gardening activity become unavailable. And, in a special sense, Nature is not worked with -- which is not wise.
But, then, as the head gardener also often notes, that is what moon gardening is all about (to use today's generation's parlance). It is about perfection. It is not about mere general acceptability.
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