YOU learn, when there’s a man in your life, once a new purchase is made, to grab and stash the instructions as men do not read labels or follow directions!
If you don’t, you are so often going to be faced with a washing machine that doesn’t work, or wind up lost on some outback adventure.
What I have learned is to keep the plant’s label, and I also learned that you cannot trust the plant’s label.
‘Luscious deep purple’ would be what my mother called, a violent puce.
‘Needs watering in summer,’ means leave the hose running or it will cark it at the first sign of a moderately warm day.
So, now I read the labels before anything gets its place in the garden.
Google is consulted, and internet gardening pages are also asked the question.
Take the Fiddlewood tree…
Labelled as ‘aromatherapy,’ it promised the utmost perfumed delight. I bought it.
At home, Doctor Google said its bark is used to make violin cases!
The gardening forum people said: Do not plant it, it grows to 20 metres, it gives some people hay fever, and the pretty perfumed flowers make the lawn slippery.
Thud.
Browsing the local nurseries, reading the labels often causes me to think.
Take the humble Leonotis: The plant is known for its medicinal and mild psychoactive properties.
The Red-Hot Poker plant label reads: ‘It should not be consumed or used in any medicinal application.’ Who eats Red Hot Pokers?
I haven’t noticed any of the local birds staggering around with their eyes rolling.
The thing about garden labels is to keep them!
Nothing is worse than buying a plant that grows to be so magnificent that it is much admired and if you haven’t kept the label, you look like a goose as you drag your toes into the grass and say, well, I don’t really know.
At least if you have memorised the label, you can dazzle them by coming out with the scientific name.
“Ah yes! My Syzygium Australe… beautiful, isn’t it?”
They really do gasp in admiration, but the fact is, that it’s just a new form of Lilly Pilly.
It pays to keep the labels!
