THE WINTER JASMINE was still spangled with flowers. They shone there, in the twilight, like late lamps burning in a secret wood. (AVIAV, 273)
THE DARKEST HOUR of the blackest week of the year could not hold me back, could not keep me indoors…. Somewhere, on some branch, there would be a bud to be welcomed. Somewhere, in the kindly shelter of a sturdy shrub, there would be the lifted tip of an emerald spear, thrust aloft through the dark earth by an impatient herald of spring. (AVIAV, 285)
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OF ALL THE winter flowers I know none is braver nor more trustworthy than the winter aconite. You simply cannot keep it down. I believe that if you asked it, it would come up on an iceberg. In fact, in my garden, it almost did, because once I planted some aconites under a tree and very shortly afterwards the ground was flooded. Then a frost came along, and the ice remained under the tree for weeks. And in spite of this, the aconites came up and actually had the impudence to flower under the ice. (HDYGG, 36)
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THE WINTER HELIOTROPE is a sort of colt’s foot, and very superior persons pretend to despise it. They say that it is dingy in colour—an observation which goes to prove that they are dingy in colour themselves. These critics also complain that it has a bad habit of spreading, and that once you get it in a garden, nothing on earth will ever get it out again. I cannot imagine any sane man wishing to get it out. (HDYGG, 39)
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THE WINTER HEATHER, erica carnea … brings the warm glow of August into the depths of winter, and spreads its rosy carpet of blossom with sublime indifference to the frost and the snow. (MH, 153–154)
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I REFUSED TO admit that there was ever a time of the year when the garden need cease to bloom, that there was not a single day, even in the snow, when it must be shrouded in dust sheets…. The best gardeners are three-hundred and-sixty-five-day-a-year gardeners, for long experience has taught them that some of the darkest days can also be among the brightest. (GOTD, 211–212)
Chapter 5
A CULTIVATED CLIMATE
Having grown up in mostly urban areas, the adult Nichols was particularly enthralled by the countryside when he lived or visited there. His enthusiastic interest in weather events and seasonal changes inspired him to pen the most heartfelt paeans.
RESPECTING MOTHER NATURE
THE ONLY ‘NATURAL’ gardens are those which are covered with weeds and choked with brambles. Learn from Nature, by all means, commune with Nature, take Nature for long and earnest walks down the garden path, but do for heaven’s sake keep the blessed creature under control. (GOTD, 38)
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I MUST CONFESS that the flower show which I love best of all is one which has no roof to keep out the sun and no walls to keep out the wind—the eternal flower show which is staged by Nature, day by day…. For in this flower show there are no labels except the leaves, and often one has to peer very closely, and to study each vein and tendril, in order to read the name that is written on it in letters of green and patterns of pollen. (HDYGG, 19–20)
·
THERE IS NO aroma of D.D.T. in the pages of Jane Austen but her gardens are no less fragrant for the lack of it. The flower-pieces which delight us in the masterpieces of the great Dutch painters of the seventeenth century are often buzzing with insects—caterpillars, beetles, moths, ladybirds and dragonflies—and sometimes I fancy that the artists inserted them not only for their beauty but in order to remind us that they are a vital element in the immensely intricate pattern woven by the supreme artist, Nature herself. (GOTM, 259)
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AS FOR THE mechanical methods which Nature has contrived in order to spread her progeny, these are so numerous and so complicated that if they had been invented by human beings they would have involved the issue of thousands of special patents. (GOTM, 136–137)
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WHEN ALL IS said and done the greatest designer of any garden, once the main outline has been established, is Nature herself. That is the heaven of it and sometimes, I think, the hell. The gardener can provide the frame, set up his easel, and sketch the pattern, but as time marches on he must constantly step aside and hand over his brush to Nature. (GOTM, 194)
ALL OVER THE garden, all through the year, Nature is slashing her brush all over the canvas, striking out new lines, hurrying and thrusting and pushing aside, dancing out of the frame, mocking, deriding, but always inspiring. (GOTM, 195)
·
THE DESIGN [a gardener] imposes must be constantly modified and sometimes totally transformed by a hand stronger than his own—the hand of Nature. Maybe the art of gardening is simply the knowledge of how to hold that hand, and how to clasp it in friendship. (GOTD, 25)
COUNTRY JOYS
I WAS FEELING very happy that afternoon. The country was a paradise. The fields were dancing with buttercups, the hedges aflame with the sweet white fires of may. Over the wall the lilac leant its tipsy plumes, giving itself in lazy wantonness to the breeze. Every thrush was a nightingale, that day, and every starling a lark. (ATR, 64)
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I THOUGHT OF that quiet field, which was so spangled with cowslips in spring that it looked like a sequin cloth, and so buttoned with mushrooms in September that it looked like a coster’s jacket. (AVIAV, 75–76)
THIS ETERNAL MUSIC of the English country! It is too quiet to be echoed by any human hands, too subtle to be set between staves or disciplined to the rhythms of art, too delicately coloured to be mirrored in any orchestral score. Eternally it sighs, through field and lane, and every hour a new masterpiece is born. (AVIAV, 103)
·
MOST COUNTRY NOISES I welcome—the shrill arguments of blackbirds in the shrubbery, the patter of big raindrops on the copper beech on a summer afternoon when thunder is abroad, the creaking branches of the chestnuts in the wind, and indeed all the tunes that the wind may play. (MH, 236)
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THE CURTAIN GOES up at 4 a.m. to a Hallelujah chorus of the birds. When the birds sing Hallelujah it is only common decency to sing Hallelujah too. You cannot do that lying on your back in bed, staring at the ceiling. You have to do it outside, on the lawn, with your bare feet in the dew. (LOTS, 150)
FACING THE ELEMENTS
THE GARDENER’S GREATEST enemy is wind. Not frost, nor snow, nor drought, nor even the sullen implacability of the soil, but wind—the wind that claws and rips at root and branch. (GOTM, 52)
WHATEVER THE WEATHER, however sportive the elements, you can always console yourself by the thought that it is indeed an ill-wind that blows no plant any good…. When the winter is hard, and loath to depart, you can draw your overcoat tighter about you and gain comfort from the thought that no early fruit blossoms are being tempted to make a premature début. (DTGP, 182–183)
·
THERE ARE TIMES when one’s desire for blue is so intense that it must resemble the craving of the drunkard for a glass of whisky. Times when one longs to stretch up and up into the heavens, to wrench away the grey casing of cloud that so often imprisons us, to let loose the floods of colour which are glowing behind. (LOTS, 138)
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THE HEAVENS BLACKENED, and for several hours a violent thunderstorm raged over Meadowstream—a real old-fashioned pantomime thunderstorm, with titans standing in the wings, dropping bricks on to sheets of steel, and the sky’s dark backcloth lit with the flickering, electric tails of demons. (SOTL, 205)
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THE THUNDER GROWLED ever farther away—till its growl was almost a blessing, like the purr of a gigantic velvety cat, prowling the fields and forests. (AVIAV, 176)
THE SYMPHONY IS always the same, and always different. For our conductor is the Weather, and he has as many moods as there are hours. Sometimes he stresses the wood wind, till you would say that there was no sound about you but the high clamour of the elms—sometimes he can bear nothing but strings, and when you go to bed at night you can remember only the way the wind hissed through the rushes on the bank of the stream. (AVIAV, 90–91)
IF YO
UR BAROMETER is in the least like mine, it may be likened to a guest who arrives extremely late at a party with news which we have all been discussing for the last three hours. My barometer registers ‘Very Dry,’ with unfailing fidelity, until the thunderstorm is over…. Barometers and politicians, one might say, at random, have much in common. They are always wise after the event. (ATR, 120)
TURNING THE CALENDAR
Spring
ONE OF APRIL’S most brilliant days—a day as sparkling as a newly-washed lemon—a day when even the shadows were a melange of blue and orange and jade, like the shadows that poured from the tipsy brush of Monet. (ATR, 34)
·
DRAMATIC IS THE only word for the way spring came, that year. For weeks the earth had been icebound, like an empty theatre. Then, suddenly, the lights were turned on, up above. The delicate fingers of the wind switched away the dust sheets of the snow. And the empty arena filled, as though with cloaks and dresses and scarves, in a thousand shades of green. (AVIAV, 163)
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THEN CAME THE spring, and the almost unbearable excitement—which can only be enjoyed in an ancient garden—of discovering where the previous owners had planted their bulbs. Of all the treasure hunts in which men have ever engaged, this must surely be the most enthralling. (MH, 170)
Summer
IT WAS A very riotous summer … when the sunlight slashed through the trees with the clash of swords, and the heat was arrogant, enveloping. A summer that took its toll of the flowers, breathing a scornful breath over the drooping roses, so that they gave up the struggle against this fierce lover, and hung their heads in weary ecstasy. (ATR, 75)
·
THE SOUND OF bees in their hive … is the Song of Summer. If you listen long enough you will hear all the secrets the wind whispered as it wantoned through the hedgerows. You will understand why the leaves were fluttering, so madly, against your window at dawn, and why there was such a poignant sweetness in the scent of the bean fields. You will hear all the things the flowers never dared to say. You will hear all the things you never dared to say, yourself. (ATR, 213)
Autumn
A SHARP FROST overnight, and in the morning a thousand little bonfires will be flickering in all the trees. There will be tongues of scarlet flame in the maples, and of yellow flame in the elms; there will be dark fires, deep in the guelder roses, so that when the wind blows you see a sombre glow of leafy embers. The sumachs will be smouldering, the thorns will be ablaze, and in the hedge at the end of the coppice there will be many fiery miracles among the brambles. (LOTS, 120–121)
·
THE LIQUIDAMBERS WERE so thickly hung with frosted cobwebs that their twigs seemed to be diamanté, and I remember thinking that they were really rather overdressed—all those jewels at so early an hour. (CXYZ, 9)
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SOME OF THE Japanese maples are inclined to be slightly intemperate in their habits. They are like young men who take one drink, grow red in the face, and become obstreperous. Some Japanese maples do that after their first nip of frost. (HDYGG, 25)
THE MAPLES AND the mountain ashes and the spindles and all the lovely autumn things swell and burgeon and expand, making the most alluring promises of what they will be doing when the frosts come, and dropping, from time to time, a little hint in the shape of a single scarlet leaf that has dressed up too soon, having made a mistake in the date of the party. (MH, 177–178)
·
NEVER WERE THERE such reds, for the maples, as I looked out my window, were en fête. They had been giving one of their last parties of the year—you know the parties maples give. All night long, in the keen frost, their faces had been flushed. Then the rain had come, and they glistened in the yellow sunlight. (ATR, 88–89)
Winter
I LOVE A good bonfire, on a December afternoon, when the heart of the fire is like a red jewel, and in the growing darkness the white smoke plumes upwards like the feathers of some fabulous bird. Bonfires, then, are among the rarest joys of man’s existence. (SOTL, 196)
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THERE IS THE tang of ice—the ice that laid out its little mirrors of glass all through the orchard in the clear days of January, so that the sky might lean close and see its face. (MH, 315)
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SPRING ALWAYS SEEMS to me like a courtship, summer like a marriage, autumn like a really grand party, and winter like a death, and yet a death that has in it an infinity of life. (HDYGG, 22)
NIGHT LIGHTS
FLOWERS, IF THEY are white, will be perfected, transfigured by the light of the moon. The snowdrops will be luminous—a twist of your imagination and you can persuade yourself that they are white elves, met on secret business. (AVIAV, 30)
·
THE SOFT STARS [were] beginning to dust the sky, as though some careless goddess had been making her toilet and had scattered the floor of the night from a silver powder box. (SOTL, 14)
SOMETIMES, ON FROSTY winter afternoons, we take out the braziers and pack them with kindling and coke and a top layer of fir-cones, and light them, and leave them to make a magic circle of warmth. Then, after dinner, we go out, wrapped up, with glasses of mulled claret in our hands, and we sit there enjoying the strangest physical sensations—tingling cold outside, glowing warmth within and all the great heavy curtains of the night about us, with silver sequins in their folds. (SOTL, 177)
Chapter 6
SECRETS OF SUCCESS
Nichols learned and retained a great deal of gardening wisdom over the years, but his gardening books are more than straightforward how-to’s. Although he sprinkles his narrative with practical tidbits, he can’t resist dressing the advice in wit and whimsy.
LIGHT IN A garden is a quarter of the battle. Another quarter is the soil of the garden. A third quarter is the skill and care of the gardener. The fourth quarter is luck. Indeed, one might say that these were the four L’s of gardening, in the following order of importance: Loam, Light, Love and Luck. (LOTS, 76–77)
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TO LEAVE DEAD pansies on a plant is as cruel as leaving a cow without anybody to milk it. (DTGP, 277)
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IT IS A very good thing to keep a gardening note-book…. If it were not for my gardening note-book I should never have planted those daffodils in the further meadow, in a bold, brave line, like a golden sword slashing through the fields of spring. I should never have beribboned the banks of the brook with bluebells…. I should have forgotten the scarlet oaks, which blaze so fiercely in October that a man may warm his hands at them. (AVIAV, 105–106)
·
DO YOU wash your camellia in your city garden? … If not, you are a depraved and heartless person…. It seems to me strange that you should wash your babies, and not your shrubs. Your shrubs, surely, are more in need of it? They have to stay out all day and all night…. Washing a tree or a shrub makes it more beautiful, brings out all sorts of hidden colours and unexpected tints. You cannot say that about washing a baby. It just goes on being a monotonous pink. (GGTC, 114)
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A MAN (DOESN’T) put on gloves when he makes love to a woman. No more he should when he tends a rose. (SOTL, 25)
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IF IT IS true that it takes God to make a tree, it is equally true that it takes two humans to plant it—unless it is very small and unless you are a very old hand at the game. You want somebody to hold it straight, and most important of all, to jiggle it. (GOTD, 229)
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YOU SHOULD BE warned that the fruit of [the weeping pear] is quite disgusting; a single nibble of it sets the teeth on edge for hours. It therefore serves an invaluable purpose as a present for obstreperous infants on those days when the garden is open to the public. (FFF, 76)
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I DO BELIEVE very firmly that there exists a ‘radiation’— for lack of a more explicit word—between the soil and ourselves, and that if this radiation is disturbed we are in some sense incomplete. There are chalk people, and there are sand people, and there are people who have an obvious affinity
with heavy, sticky clay. And there are people like myself who demand peat, not merely because they want to grow rhododendrons but because the moment they set foot on it they respond to it physically and emotionally. (SOTL, 142–143)
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EVEN IN A small garden such as mine the quality of the soil has many variations…. This is especially noticeable in old gardens, where the ghostly remains of ancient cemented paths still haunt the beds which the new owners have dug for themselves, or where the limy foundations of long-forgotten out-buildings still linger on, to poison the roots of an unsuspecting rhododendron. Against such a combination of history and chemistry and sheer bad luck, the long-suffering horticulturist is impotent. (GOTM, 250)
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‘KNOW THY SOIL’ is as vital an injunction to the gardener as ‘Know thyself ’ to the philosopher. (GOTM, 255)
Chapter 7
THE FINE ART OF GARDENING
Nichols’s writing is filtered through an artistic perception, his commentaries couched in terms of painting, music, and architecture. He has a highly developed response to the senses and is especially adept at evoking sounds and fragrances.
GARDENS BY DESIGN
LIFE IS MEANINGLESS without some aim, and so is a garden path. By which I do not mean that you have to have some awful little statue glowering at you from the end, or some unnecessary sundial, or a door leading nowhere. All I mean is that if you are walking down the garden path you must walk to something, even if it is only a tree, or a gap in the hedge through which you can look out on to quiet fields. (GGTC, 86)
Rhapsody in Green Page 4
