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EVERY GARDEN PATH can be magically extended if it is made to take a sudden turn to the right or to the left. Which means that somewhere in its course it must encounter a wall, a cluster of trees, even a wooden fence, set there to provoke the eye, to intrigue it, to make one ask the ultimate question—what lies beyond? (GOTD, 27)
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IT TAKES A very old wall, wrinkled by a thousand rains and winds, enriched by a thousand chance particles of matter, of dust and flying leaf, to offer a shelter in which a flower can really feel at home. Even then, how infinite must have been the number of seeds that have drifted into it, on a summer breeze, before a single one found a resting place. (GGTC, 193)
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THE BEAUTY OF a square garden begins with the creation of curves, and the beauty of a circular or irregular garden begins with the creation of squares or rectangles. It is a question of the harmonious blending of the two. (GOTD, 25)
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DOUBLING THE SIZE of the garden by cutting it in half: although this may sound like a paradox, it is plain common sense. A garden is a picture; every picture has a focal point, and if, as it wanders towards the focal point, the eye can be diverted, the picture is thereby apparently enlarged. (GOTD, 26–27)
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THE MEN WHO write about gardens never tire of telling us to follow Nature and to copy Nature’s secrets…. But when I visit their gardens I have a feeling that Nature cannot have had very much to say to them. Whoever saw a straight border designed by Nature? When did Nature learn the habits of the drill sergeant? (GOTD, 28–29)
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A GREAT DEAL of weeping goes on in my garden, but it is a happy sort of weeping, for all this bending of branches and bowing of heads is simply due to the fact that so much beauty is displayed on so small a stage. Very few owners of small gardens seem to realize how greatly they can increase the number of trees they are able to accommodate by the simple method of planting those varieties that either weep of their own accord or because we have encouraged them to do so by a little gentle training. (FFF, 76)
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YOU ARE STANDING in the middle of a square empty lawn, determined to have a heather garden but wondering how on earth you can make it look natural, as though it had arrived there of its own accord…. After endless prowlings, mutterings, stickings-in of bamboo stakes, coupled with a great deal of squintings and neck-crickings and even bendings-double to see how it looked upside down through one’s legs, I arrived at what seems to me the only solution, which is to make a ‘splodge’, almost as if you were making a big blot of ink on a sheet of paper. (GOTM, 38–39)
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THREE CHERRIES, OR five, or whatever the number may be, never two or four. I have always done this myself, instinctively, ever since I planted my first trees. Why? I suppose the answer lies in the fact that one has tried to walk with Nature, and that Nature does not dispose her treasures in squares or in parallel lines. (GOTM, 59)
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THREE CLUMPS OF red hot pokers are just silly. They look extremely mean and slightly indecent. YOU WANT AN ARMY OF RED HOT POKERS. (AVIAV, 104)
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THE FEET OF the gardener are of first importance in garden design; indeed, without proper feet, attached to a pair of agile legs, it is difficult to see how a garden can be designed at all. (GOTM, 193–194)
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HOW IS IT possible to assess the value—in shape, and colour, and general aesthetic significance—of a single branch of a single tree unless one has viewed it from every conceivable angle, in every condition of light and shade, at every time of the year? How can one plot the curve of a single bed unless one has pondered it, and continued to ponder it, time and again—gone to bed with it, dreamt about it? (GOTM, 194)
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IN CREATING A garden we are creating—or endeavouring to create—a work of art. We are not merely filling in a blank space around the house, nor contriving a playground for tiny tots, nor providing ourselves with enough spinach for our old age. (GOTM, 193)
SELECTING THE PALETTE
PEOPLE HAVE A habit of saying airily that ‘flower colours never clash!’ I should like them to have heard what a certain scarlet geranium of my acquaintance said to a neighbouring fuchsia, last spring. They might alter their opinion. (DTGP, 130–131)
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IN SUCH A small space it was essential to get as many reds as possible, or they would have begun to pick quarrels. Two reds always fight; a dozen are always friends. (GGTC, 110)
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MOST OF THE writers on gardens do not agree that flowers gain in brilliance if they are placed in close proximity to other flowers of the same colour…. This has always seemed to me regrettable, particularly in flower arrangements. White lilies look best against a white wall in a white vase…. The gold of daffodils is enhanced by the gold of forsythia. Green echoes green and complements it. (GOTD, 50)
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IF YOU GROUP a few bamboos among your autumn-coloured shrubs you will enormously enhance the effect of your reds and your yellows by this background of fresh green. Bamboos are, perhaps, the only evergreens that seem perpetually young. (HDYGG, 32)
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PARADOXICALLY, BLUE IS a colour that makes many people see red; by which I mean that fierce arguments are constantly developing as to which flower is the bluest…. The caryopteris is radiant in any weather…. The blue of its petals seems to have the quality of carrying for great distances, as though it were some sort of floral evangelist with a message of good tidings for all the world. (FFF, 12)
IT HAS TAKEN me over thirty years of tireless experiment to discover the glory of grey in the garden, to reach the stage where I can write that it now seems to me as important as any of the colours on the gardener’s palette, and maybe even more important. (GOTM, 89)
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WHITE IS NOT the absence of colour, it is colour in infinite variety, so that an all-white garden is as exciting as the most brilliant border. (GOTD, 139)
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I WONDER HOW many there are who, when they are picking a rose, realize that the rose leaves are often more brilliant in colour and more delicate in form than the flower itself ? (HDYGG, 19)
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[HOSTA] LEAVES, PROVIDED that you do not throw them away as soon as they begin to turn, have a habit of painting themselves in a long series of subtle, glowing colours. The blue sheen fades away, the edges become rimmed with gold, and the gold spreads over the whole leaf, mottling and dappling it until—come October—you have something that looks as though it has been fashioned in burnished bronze. (FFF, 36)
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GOLD IN THE garden is worth a lot more than gold in the bank…. And just as money breeds money, so, in the garden, gold magnifies gold. (GOTM, 246)
RIPPLES AND REFLECTIONS
JUST AS A room without a mirror is dead, so a garden without water is never quite alive. (MH, 285)
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THE WATER IN the pool … is not only a mirror but a magnet, with a power that reaches to the ends of space. It can pluck the moon from the sky and float it like a lily; it can reach up to the dark night to draw down the stars and hold them shining to its breast; and through all the seasons it paints its pictures of the flowers that lean over it. (MH, 286)
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ONE OF THE subtlest delights of a water garden is the delight of sound; the sudden ‘plop’ as a goldfish rises to catch a gnat, the high sharps and trebles of a tiny fountain, the faint buzz of a dragon-fly, the sigh of the wind in the reeds by the edge. (GOTD, 153)
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ONE IS HEAVY and oppressed, walking across the lawn one’s feet drag slowly, one reaches the pool, and stares into the water. And then, even in winter when the lilies are sleeping, something seems to happen. The clouds float at one’s feet across the steely surface, the bare branches of the copper beech have the delicate perfection of a Chinese drawing, a bird skims the water, tracing a single exquisite curve, and round the little statue in the centre is spread a liquid tapestry of purest
blue. Here is a province of its own, a place of retreat and solitude, where the world’s alarms are far away. (GOTD, 26)
IN A MAD moment, I once made a Polythene pond. And the reason why I developed a fierce hatred for it before it was even finished can be summed up in two words— damp underwear. That is what it made me think of, from the very first moment when the Polythene was stretched across the hole. This was not a pool. It was old gentlemen’s drawers. (GOTD, 149)
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I WILL NOT write a long saga about the pool we made…. It is the sort of thing which the Daily Herald will tell you can be dug over the week-end by a not very bright child with a not very sharp spade. I need hardly say that in fact it required an army of workmen and cost the earth. (MH, 290)
OUTDOOR DECOR
I DON’T LIKE garden ornaments. Somewhere, we may be sure, in one of the suburbs of Purgatory, there is an arid garden where dwell the spirits of all those misshapen creatures who have been decorating so many gardens for so many years. (GGTC, 189)
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YOU MAY WEAKLY agree, at first, to buy one leaden cupid. The cupid will arrive, looking like a very horrible baby that has been petrified just as it was having an acute attack of wind. You think that perhaps if you get a quickly growing ivy you may be able to cover its revolting nakedness. But you are mistaken. Your purchase of the cupid has caused your name to be entered in the books of the gardening firm as a ‘sucker’. (DTGP, 282)
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THEY WERE DELICATELY carved in lead, and on the sides of each urn four heads were embossed…. Whatever they cost they had to be mine. Repairing the roof could wait; mending the cracks in the ceiling could wait; the peculiar smell in the woodshed could, and almost certainly would, wait. I had to have those urns. (MH, 70)
FOLLOWING THE SCENT
THE SWEET FRAGRANCE of the flowers gives to the mind an amiability in which the most fanciful conceptions flower freely. (DTGP, 235)
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TAKE THE SCENT of a sunlit nectarine, add a pinch of lemon verbena, sweeten with a drop of the essence of tuberose—and you have a faint idea of the fragrance of the flower of the [grape] vine. (MH, 81–82)
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JUST BY THE porch there is [a] lemon-verbena, for crunching and sniffing purposes on one’s exits and entrances. (It is heart-rending to think that there must be quite large numbers of people who have to go to work every morning without the soothing anodyne of a pinch of lemon-verbena; one cannot imagine how they get through the day.) (CXYZ, 17–18)
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THERE ARE MELANCHOLY scents—pear blossom that carries with it a feeling that youth is all too transient; there are gay scents, such as the laughing perfume of vine blossoms, which Bacon described as the sweetest of all the garden’s essences. There are feminine scents—some of them, like gardenias, so intensely feminine that they are almost embarrassing. And there are masculine scents— moss, bergamot, wood smoke, new-mown hay, and certain vegetables, such as the velvety inside of young broad beans. (GOTD, 158)
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SCENTED PLANTS, I think, should be disposed strategically. By which I mean that there should be something at the front door, to calm one’s goings out and comfort one’s comings in, and something at the end of the lawn to sniff, and crunch, and talk about. (GOTD, 159)
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Azara microphylla is rewarding for an unusual reason, because of its scent. It smells so strongly of vanilla that on sunny days, when little boys walk past the railings of my cottage, they pause and their noses twitch, as though they were saying to themselves: ‘The ice-cream man cometh.’ (GOTD, 213)
THE EXQUISITELY PRETTY little daphne is fragrant out of doors, on even the coldest morning, under the darkest skies. Some of my happiest memories are of bending down and pushing my nose against its petals, marvelling, as I do so, that this summer fragrance should be stored in the icy heart of winter. (FFF, 20)
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FOR THE ELDERLY, the whole subject of fragrance in the garden is one to which more attention might be given. The sense of smell is one of the last to desert us and it can give delight and consolation to the end of our lives. Moreover it involves no physical effort. One has yet to hear of anybody dying of exhaustion of the nostrils. (GOTM, 262)
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THE WORLD NEEDS lavender fans a great deal more urgently than it needs many of the things which it regards as essential. At every international conference there should be lavender fans, to waft sweetness into the dilated nostrils of the participants. There should be lavender fans on the table at every director’s meeting, and there should be a large stock of lavender fans at the entrances to the House of Commons and Congress. (SOTL, 240)
TO BE ‘OVERPOWERED’ by the fragrance of flowers is a most delectable form of defeat. (MH, 240)
FLORAL HARMONY
THE BEAUTY OF the moonflower evokes music—the nocturnes of Chopin, the preludes of Debussy, and, above all, the long, haunting cadences of Swan Lake. You can hardly ask for more, from a little brown seed. (SOTL, 254)
CHOPIN, INDEED, IS our most frequent visitor, from the first snowdrop to the last leaf that drifts from the beeches on a winter’s evening. The narcissi dance his mazurkas under the pear tree and throughout the summer his nocturnes echo over the lily pool. For every flower there is a Chopin étude. (GOTM, 151–152)
FLOWERS AND COMPOSERS THIS might make an agreeable diversion for the parlour. Chopin, a narcissus in the rain? Debussy, love-in-a-mist? Rachmaninoff—a creeper of some sort, twisted and tortured, like a wisteria that has been struck by lightning and yet still manages to produce incredible cadenzas of blossom. Beethoven? I suppose that we must settle for the obvious giant oak, even if it is sometimes a blasted oak. (FFF, 8)
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AS A FRUSTRATED composer I have always regarded gardens in terms of music, and it is perhaps significant that the people who have been the kindest about the few gardens I have been able to design have been musicians. When the late Sir Thomas Beecham stepped on to the lawn at Merry Hall … when the balustrades were garlanded in white roses, he exclaimed, ‘This is sheer Mozart!’ (GOTM, 149)
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A BLOSSOMING APPLE tree is not merely a blossoming apple tree. It is an étude in D major, in six-eight time, scored mainly in the treble. And across the trunk, when one is contemplating it—particularly if an April breeze is alert among the branches—one mentally scribbles the mood in which the étude is to be played: Allegro vivace. (GOTM, 150)
Chapter 8
DOMESTIC AFFAIRS
For Nichols, the garden was an extension of the home and he delighted in showing it to visitors. Hosting social occasions always involved showing guests around the garden and filling the house with cut flowers for them in the colder months. His cats had the run of the home and garden, and were indulged in ways that Nichols did not always extend to his visitors.
BOUQUETS AND DISPLAYS
THERE IS ONLY one ‘basic rule’ in flower arrangement. And that is to love the flowers, to listen to what they have to say, to watch the way they dance, and then to allow them to express themselves in their own sweet way. (TAOFA, 202)
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I HAVE ALWAYS tried to let the flowers speak for themselves; I have never asked them to say things which Nature never intended them to say; I have never chopped off their stems, nor twisted their heads, nor tortured their leaves, nor throttled them with wires, nor used any of the loathsome Gestapo tricks of the fashionable florist. (MH, 267)
IF YOU PICK a bunch of Christmas roses, and then pick a few tips of Lawson cypress, and arrange the cypress tips behind the Christmas roses inside out, the result is of a beauty indescribable. Because, you see, the inside of the Lawson cypress, which forms the commonest hedge in a million suburban gardens, is delicately flecked with silver. When you put it behind the Christmas roses, the white and silver seem to sing together. It is moonlight calling to moonlight. (SOTL, 245–246)
IF YOU PICK a water-lily in full flower and bring it indoors to float in a bowl, it will look ravish
ing for a few hours; but then it starts to sulk and close up, and next morning it is giving a very good impersonation of an ill-tempered Jerusalem artichoke. (GOTD, 137)
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I DO NOT care for artificial flowers. This would be an understatement; I should like to make a bonfire of the whole hard, dusty, chemically-coloured collection. Better a withered dandelion in a jam pot than these bogus monstrosities. (GOTD, 170)
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EVEN A SINGLE ‘shop’ carnation in a country bunch seems to put the whole thing out of focus, like a woman in a Dior dress at a meeting of the parish council. (GOTD, 208)
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EVEN A CLUSTER of dock seeds, if set in the right vase and cunningly lit, can be made to look as exotic as a group of orchids. (TAOFA, 122)
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VERY FEW SEEM to have grasped the possibilities of the common looking-glass. This seems very odd, if only for economic reasons; after all, six roses in front of a mirror automatically become a dozen roses. (GOTD, 206)
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I HAD LONG been worried by the difficulty of transporting certain flowers from the country…. The dahlias were the worst…. Then one day … I had a brain wave. Why not get a small sheet, hang it in the car suspended from the roof, and then pass the stalks of the dahlias through it, so that the blossoms rested on the sheet, without touching one another, and the stalks dangled down into the air? The fact that one would look like the old woman who lived in a shoe if one drove a car so curiously laden did not deter me. (DTGP, 265–266)
THE BUTTERCUP IS ‘as tough as they come’. If we pick it kindly and swiftly, and do not linger too long in the sunlight, and if we let it rest in a bucket for the night, it will delight us for a whole week. And if it chooses— when nobody is looking—to let a few petals fall onto the highly-polished mahogany of the Sheraton table where its elegance entitles it to be placed, we should allow those petals to remain, to linger on in a slowly fading gold, to become part of the pattern. (TAOFA, 137)
Rhapsody in Green Page 5
