Jackie French: The 'bung it in' method of gardening

My "bung method" was used to create my garden. Neighbour Jean gave me cuttings and told me to "bung them in". So I did, and they mostly grew: a hillside of white Federation daisies, plus French lavender, fuchsias, wormwood, salvias, deciduous hibiscus, grapes, roses ... Jean's glorious rose garden was grown exclusively from bits other people had pruned off. Jean "bunged" them in along the front of her house.

The bung method is simple. Take a cutting, at least 60cm of firm wood. Push it at least 30cm into the soil where you want it to grow. Water and wait. Most will grow. You can also "bung" cuttings into a pot of sand, kept damp, especially if the cuttings might get covered in weeds before they produce roots and leaves.

This is the perfect time for "bunging". I've been thrusting great bundles of salvia prunings at visitors for the last three weeks. I'm not exactly sure which varieties of salvia we have here.

I'm almost sure that one of our salvia groves is "Friendship Sage" (Salvia 'Amistad'), which is perfectly named. When your friend's cuttings grow, you get a slightly fragrant leafy plant, about 1.5 metres high, covered in giant spires of purple-blue flowers, ostensibly from spring to winter, but here it blooms from mid-summer to mid-winter. The blooms last in vases for about a fortnight, and the plants grow in full sun or light shade. One cutting will slowly spread till it's a great clump of stems.

It might, however, be Salvia 'Anthony Parker' which is supposed to have deep purple sprays of flowers from mid-summer to mid-winter. It grows about the same height, and is similarly drought and heat hardy and loved by birds and bees. Actually, I suspect we have both, plus Salvia guaranitica, with its dark blue flowers from spring to autumn, and Salvia corrugata too, which blooms all spring to autumn, in a paler sea of extraordinary blue.

One of my favorite of the large salvias, Salvia Golden Fountain, is just beginning to lose its incredible spires of bright yellow. I get all the tall growing salvias whipper snipped to ground level about now, as the new growth begins to emerge from the soil. Every stem can become a cutting to be "bunged". Smaller salvias need more restrained pruning after blooming.

My personal "bunging" this year is limited to hydrangeas - we should have at least six new plants out of the 20 or so cuttings from prunings from a friend's vivid red bushes. If I could find some old-fashioned Federation daisies, I'd bung in cuttings of those, too - the modern ones are smaller, both in flower and bush size. I lost mine when my husband decided we had too much white in the garden, white being a waste of space that could be filled with "real" colour.

READ MORE: JACKIE FRENCH

I went on a fuchsia binge about 20 years ago, bunging in snips from a friend's collection and planting them in half barrels and hanging baskets all around the house. The baskets and the barrels slowly rotted, and my friend moved, plus fuchsias do need regular watering, which the rain may not give them in the summer to come, nor would I be likely to. But if you want baskets of beauty, a mass of fuchsias are hard to beat.

"Bunging" doesn't work for every plant. Most natives requite hormones and humidity - follow instructions from a useful book from the library. But "bunging" is also my favorite method of flower arranging - grab blooms and bung into a vase. Most cake and biscuit recipes also benefit from bunging in a handful of choc chips. Just like bunging in the cuttings above, you'll find the result rarely goes bung.

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