By Victoria Plum 
By Victoria Plum
The Reepham & District Gardening Club Christmas party was a fun event, a chance to chat – in fact the chairperson almost had difficulty keeping order!
We took food; punch and nibbles were provided. If you have never attended please keep it in your mind for next year as it is always a relaxed and enjoyable time to get to know other members in this sociable club.
There was entertainment, too, and one of the items really struck a chord with me. It featured a dialogue (fictional, I assume) between God and St Francis, the patron saint for animals and the environment.
God looks down on the earth and is puzzled by the sight of many green squares. “Where are all the flowers I organised for the little insects and creatures?” says God.
St Francis responds that the green squares are grass that gardeners choose to keep cut to a low height, fertilise and then cut again.
Mystified, God asks “Why? Perhaps they feed animals with the cuttings?”
“No, the waste is thrown away.”
God is puzzled. But as the weather heats up, God suggests, the rate of growth slows and so the chore of cutting would not be necessary?
Then St Francis explains that people get out the hose and water the grass, so it grows, and, guess what, they have to keep cutting it. God is puzzled by this.
(I wonder how St Francis would explain the garden centres to God. What would God think of the shelves of poisons we buy and the plastic ephemera from China, the biggest polluter of the environment, when all we really need are plants and pots – and a bit of common sense.)
I was also reminded of an image shown to us last month by Hawk Honey, the bee expert from the Suffolk Wildlife Trust. This featured a bird’s-eye view of a green square of grass versus a bird’s-eye view of a meadow of flowers.
He made the point that the green square was no good to bees: they need flowering plants. It is not difficult to understand. The grass provides no sustenance or shelter; the flowering plants, of course, provide both.
We can all make a difference because our many small plots collectively amount to thousands of acres of God’s green earth.
Don’t let our generation be the one that thoughtlessly poisoned everything in our keenness to over tidy and control nature rather than live in harmony with it.
The next meeting of the Reepham & District Gardening Club is on Tuesday 21 January at 7.45 pm in Reepham Town Hall, Church Street, Reepham, when Tamara Bridge will tell us about designing and building a garden at Chelsea.
If you think the above photograph of grass is boring, then sympathise with the tiny creatures who have nowhere else to live and feed. – VP
Geoff Fisher