Gardening with Smut

With Spring well-advanced now and the equinoctial gales finally dying down, the unearthly ichor will be burgeoning within your half-plant half-human grafting experiments, and it is time to think about pruning them.

Using a sharp knife such as the one you use for vivisecting badgers, cut away any heads, torsos, hands or other body parts that have withered during winter. Cut diagonally and smear balsam from the dedaim plant onto the semi-animated stump to staunch the slow, viscid leakage of pale pink fluids, neither blood nor sap.* Decide whether you prefer to direct the growth of the abominable hybrid vertically into a column, or let it spread sideways into an old-fashioned broad espalier. This is also a good time to replace the fertiliser at the base of the root-stock, if last year's body has been drained of all nourishment.

A lot of people think that these morbid grafts will only thrive indoors, roofed over with great sheets of lead and copper, preferably lit by the sanguine light from a fiery globe levitated by infernal power and fed with the never-dying flames of that clime in which the fruits of Thasaidon swell to unearthly size. This is used to be true but with the modern root-stocks they can grow quite comfortably outside, in sunny dry conditions sheltered from the wind, as shown at the top.

Of course this is also the time of year when the pests are proliferating. Last year my Virgin-&-Child graft was flourishing with obscene vitality and I had high hopes for a prize from the Unnatural Necromantic Horticultural Show, but the a-phids sucked the fluids from it practically overnight.

* The stuff stains something awful and is a bugger to get out of your clothes, but an immediate bubble-bath sometimes works.