Rhapsody in Green
Page 6
·
IN ANY FLORAL arrangement, if we study it carefully, we can read some of the secrets of the arranger’s heart. (TAOFA, 216)
·
WE CANNOT SOLVE the problems of mankind by arranging flowers; we cannot turn back the tides of war nor set a term to the follies which provoke them. But we can bring a little peace into our own hearts, and shed a little light throughout the domestic circles in which we move and have our being. (TAOFA, 233)
THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY
I WAS NO longer living in the heart of the country, no longer master of all I surveyed. I was surrounded by quantities of small sovereign states, all intensely nationalist, and populated by mysterious and possibly hostile tribes who, in the history of Suburbia, are described by the generic term of ‘Neighbours’. (GGTC, 32)
·
WE HAD TWO and a half varieties of ceanothus…. This enumeration is not perverse: the ‘half ’ was rooted in the little front garden of my next-door neighbour, Mrs Poyser, but it had stretched its pretty arms so obligingly over my own plot that I had come to regard it as partly mine. (There should be more of this pleasing co-operation between neighbours.) (GOTM, 26)
·
A GARDEN CAN MAKE or mar a friendship. It brings out all sorts of hidden virtues and unsuspected vices…. It is as though a curious light were reflected from the petals of the flowers—a light in which the emotions are sharply revealed. (DTGP, 80–81)
·
WHENEVER YOU ARE showing people over a garden, it is vital that they should go the longest possible way round. It may be that there is only one thing in the garden—say a forsythia—that can lay any claim to excellence … but it must not receive attention till the right moment. There must be a conspiracy of silence about it. If some tiresome guest, stepping out on to the terrace, observes the forsythia, exclaims with delight, and proceeds to make a bee-line for it, she must be gently but firmly dragged back…. The way to the forsythia is arduous and complicated…. To look at it too soon is not only impolite. It is positively cruel. (GGTC, 84–85)
·
LONG EXPERIENCE HAS taught me that people who do not like geraniums have something morally unsound about them. Sooner or later you will find them out; you will discover that they drink, or steal books, or speak sharply to cats. Never trust a man or a woman who is not passionately devoted to geraniums. (LOTS, 65)
·
AS A FLOWER [Iris stylosa] has only one drawback; it arouses feelings of gross rapacity in one’s female friends, who wish to snatch it and pin it to their bosoms and wear it to the opera, where it would certainly die. We must devise our own techniques for dealing with such creatures. (FFF, 43)
THE ANCESTRY [of rosemary] is from the Latin ros, which means spray, on account of its liking to grow over the cliffs of the Mediterranean, and marinus, which of course means sea. This sort of information, if dropped casually as you are walking round the garden, is calculated to irritate one’s dearest friends. (GOTM, 29)
·
ONE OF MY perennial guests is the Bishop of Southwark, who is a party in himself. (The first time he ever called on me he was wearing purple robes, and as soon as he saw the rhododendrons through the window he walked over to them and stood there, looking very magnificent. Then, with great earnestness, he enquired ‘Do I match?’) (DTKS, 176)
CATTY REMARKS
A FULL LIFE, it will generally be agreed, demands both a garden and a cat, but sometimes (particularly during planting out) life can be almost too full, if your cats are as keen on gardening as mine. Each plant has to be inspected, and if possible rolled upon. And the places where you desire to dig holes are invariably the places which the cat chooses for a long, deep sleep. (GGTC, 241–242)
·
WHEN SEEDS HAVE been sown in the open ground, it is discouraging to look out of the window and see that pussy is using the precise place where they are sown as a public convenience. A nice new seed-bed, to pussy, is an immediate reminder that the time has come for washing the hands or powdering the nose. (CABC, 41)
IF IT IS the month of May, when the blossom is out, and if one is accompanied by a white Persian kitten, which allows itself to be lifted on to a lower branch, in order to dab at twigs, moments of the utmost enchantment are almost certain to ensue. (CABC, 14)
·
THERE IS SOMETHING dead about a lawn which has never been shadowed by the swift silhouette of a dancing kitten. (GOTM, 167)
·
I AM HONOURED by the visits of neighbouring felines. They appear dramatically on the tops of walls, spying out the land (all cats, of course, are in the secret service), or they dart from out of the darkness of the tool-shed. Sometimes they stroll, with apparent nonchalance, across the open lawn, which gives rise to scenes of great tension if any of my own cats happen to be engaged in counter-espionage at the widows, as they often are. (GOTD, 219–220)
·
THERE WERE SEVERAL reasons why it was impracticable to attempt to grow flowers on the top of the wall. There were, in fact, seventeen reasons, some black, some tabby and two ginger. (GGTC, 192)
·
WELL-ESTABLISHED CLUMPS OF heather are in great favour with equally well-established felines, who like to lie in it, dabbing at the bees and pretending to be lions. (GOTM, 44)
·
CATS AND FLOWERS have played so large a part in my life that I can scarcely think of one without the other. In a cluster of wild hyacinths I can see reflected the blue eyes of my first Siamese; on warm May mornings he would wander to the shadow of an old wall where the hyacinths had come by chance, and dispose himself most elegantly upon them. If reproached for squashing the hyacinths, he merely blinked; the blue eyes and the blue flowers, mingling together, were so beautiful that there was nothing to be done about it. (CXYZ, 34)
Chapter 9
WHO DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?
That gardeners are often deemed eccentric is not lost on Nichols. But rather than downplay his foibles and follies, he revels in them, freely admitting their existence. Many gardeners have read these confessions with great relief, finding they aren’t the only ones with such thoughts and habits.
PECULIAR TO THE SPECIES
SOME FALL IN love with women; some fall in love with art; some fall in love with death. I fall in love with gardens, which is much the same as falling in love with all three at once. For a garden is a mistress, and gardening is a blend of all of the arts, and if it is not the death of me, sooner or later, I shall be much surprised. (MH, 17)
·
EVERY GARDENER HAS a strange and romantic tale to tell, if you can worm it out of him—of blue flowers that came up yellow, or of a white lily that sinned in the night and greeted the dawn with crimson cheeks. In the strong heart of every gardener some wild secret stirs. (DTGP, 132–133)
I THINK THAT gardeners must be like parents. No parent wants to talk about anybody else’s child. His own son’s adenoids are far more charming to him than any other infant’s achievements. And I would rather shake earwigs out of my own dahlias than pick the rarest orchids from the hottest of Sir Philip Sassoon’s houses. (DTGP, 189)
·
I ONCE KNEW a man whose wife threatened him with divorce…. He had been away for three months and in his absence she had presented him with a baby. She perversely supposed that his first action, on returning home, would be to come to her room in order to pay his respects to her, and it. Not at all. He found it of more immediate importance to hurry across the lawn to inspect a recently planted Embothrium coccineum. This behaviour she found unnatural; some women have no sense of priorities. (GOTM, 18)
·
DO YOU EVER find yourself bursting into a sort of lunatic laughter at the sheer prettiness of things? (GOTM, 114)
·
YOU CAN NO more stop a garden from walking, in spirit, into the house of a gardener than you can stop the sea from flowing, in spirit, into the house of a sailor…. For there is always a little mud on the floor, a feeling of flowers everywhere
, a perpetual surge and whisper of branches, and a heavenly scent of flowers. (ATR, 12)
GOOD GARDENERS ARE not quite sane. And all good gardeners will understand me when I refer to this mad urgency to see the garden before it is dark. I think that a large proportion of the road accidents, during the shorter months of the year, must be due to ardent gardeners who are terrified lest they should arrive home too late to ‘make the tour’. (AVIAV, 20)
·
I WOULD RATHER have ten square yards of sour soil, surrounded by a hedge so high that it blocked the sun out, than a hundred acres of land without a hedge…. It is not a really very gross exaggeration, and most English gardeners will share it with me…. We cannot explain to foreigners that we have a horror of being seen when we do not wish to be seen. (AVIAV, 67–68)
[MY GARDEN WORKER] was the world’s champion waterer. He really loved it…. It is almost as though he were an evangelist, saving souls instead of flowers—as though the sweet brown pond-water, that poured from the can, were a holy water which he had taken from some secret well of the spirit. (AVIAV, 57–58)
·
THE FLOWER SHOW is one of the few places left where it is possible to see a lot of people one knows and yet avoid any danger of having to speak to them, or being asked to lunch, or receiving an invitation to address a public meeting. For the minute one sees an acquaintance in the distance, one can instantly bury one’s nose in the centre of a large herbaceous shrub and keep it there, like an ostrich, until the danger is past. (HDYGG, 14)
·
WHENEVER I AM in a garden shop I feel like jumping on the counter and making a speech, because people oughtn’t to be allowed to buy such beautiful, precious things as seeds and bulbs if they are only going to maltreat them. (GGTC, 243)
·
I FIND IT DIFFICULT to leave a rose-bed without gathering up the freshly fallen petals; there is something not only wasteful but callous in leaving those fragments of gold and crimson velvet to wither in the sun. (SOTL, 235)
·
I WONDER IF I am the only gardener who has sometimes sunk so low as to nip a seed-pod from a public garden? Obviously it is not a habit to be carried to extremes, but are there not occasions when it might be justified? … One says to oneself: ‘I came to this place in a heavily taxed car, using heavily taxed petrol, which I paid for out of a heavily taxed income. I am bowed down with taxes, and I need flowers to help me to survive’…. So one takes it, and as one does so one goes scarlet in the face and one’s heart beats a violent tattoo, and for weeks afterwards every ring at the door suggests a visit from the police. (FFF, 71)
·
LONG EXPERIENCE HAS taught me that whereas people will take advice about love, and about money, and about nearly all the problems which beset us in life, they will scarcely ever take advice about their gardens. (GOTM, 60)
DO YOU SPRING out of bed … in the middle of the night, in case there is something you may forget? Do you stick up notices like ‘Must have a mass of grape hyacinths in the drive next year’, and tie it round your toothbrush? … One day I nearly went down into the City having forgotten to remove from my hat a large envelope bearing the strange device, ‘Have you sprayed everything?’ (GGTC, 211)
·
ALL GREAT GARDENERS … are also great ramblers; they spend the happiest and most significant days of their lives prowling and poking about and going around in circles. (GOTM, 105)
·
OFTEN, IN THE garden, I have found some plant that has seeded itself in a spot where you would think its frail roots could not possibly gain a hold. Perhaps it is only a common rock-plant that has pitched its gay camp on some wind-swept, barren wall, and is flying its yellow flag in the teeth of every wind. But though it is ‘common,’ the miraculous courage of such a plant defeats me. I could no more destroy it, even if it is an intruder, than I could tear up a rose tree that was decked in all the crimson regalia of July. (ATR, 24)
·
ONE SEES A woolly caterpillar having an expense-account luncheon off the leaves of a Super Star rose; and one’s hard clever hands go out to squash it. And then, suddenly, one does not feel so hard or so clever, and one’s fingers falter and a thousand moral problems present themselves. Here is this small furry creature, which has something faintly kittenish about it, and perhaps this may be the crowning moment of its life. (GOTM, 123)
ONE DAY I shall reach an age when I shan’t be able to look thirty years ahead in my garden. That will be rather a bitter day. Because all gardeners want to look thirty years ahead. (AVIAV, 175)
LISTENING TO THE FLOWERS
I ALWAYS THINK FLOWERS know what you are saying about them. If I see a scraggly lupin, I like to pass well out of its hearing before delivering any adverse comments on it. For how do we know what tortures it may be suffering? It surely can be no more pleasant for a lupin to have to appear with tarnished petals than for a woman to be forced to walk about with a spotty face. (DTGP, 75)
·
I BELIEVE, WHEN I touch a plant or a tree, that there occurs some contact more subtle and intimate than the mere laying of human hands on vegetable substance, I believe that my blood and the blood of the tree are mingled—green to red, and red to green, as the blood of a man who has died is mingled with the earth. (AVIAV, 274)
·
MY OWN WISTARIA … has grown right round the window, and in summer, if you want to shut the window, you have to take great care to push away the stem, for the leaves have pushed themselves over the ledge. I feel rather guilty at shutting out so beautiful a thing, when it is obviously anxious to come inside…. Every summer the wistaria has to be gently told that it has come far enough. (GGTC, 77–78)
·
WHEN MAKING A bunch of mixed flowers from a border, I have sometimes picked one which I don’t really want at all, in case it should feel neglected. A habit which no doubt carries sensitivity to the pitch of sickliness. But the world wouldn’t be much worse off in these days if a few people were a little more sensitive. (GGTC, 268)
HOWEVER SOLITARY YOU may be by nature, however averse to entertaining and giving parties, don’t you find that there are times when the sweet peas, as it were, send out their own invitations to tea, or when the irises inform you, in no uncertain voice, that they will be ‘at home’ next Sunday afternoon? (MH, 192)
·
THERE IS A great deal of truth in the old saying that in a garden the best fertilizer is ‘the shadow of the owner’. (MH, 192)
·
THE GREAT MAJORITY of the flowers in my garden are in their present places because they have personally informed me, in the clearest possible tones, that this is where they wish to be. Listening to flowers is one of the most important of all the gardener’s duties. (GOTD, 29)
·
I DO INDEED believe that flowers have feelings, and that these feelings extend to the human beings who tend them. If it is true—as it surely is—that there are ‘green fingers’, to which flowers react in sympathy, why should there not also be ‘black fingers’, from which flowers—certain flowers—withdraw in distaste? (GOTD, 81)
·
SOME PEOPLE SEEM to forget that a plant is very like a human being. It is much nicer, of course, and much prettier and much pleasanter than a human being, but we are bound to admit the resemblance. (HDYGG, 45)
Chapter 10
SEASONED REFLECTIONS
Underneath Nichols’s biting humor and florid descriptions dwells a tendency toward thoughtful contemplation peppered with surprisingly profound observations. His evocations of nature’s abounding beauty, its soothing effect and its near-religious spirituality form a philosophy that offers a wealth of garden-related curatives for mankind’s ills.
SAFE HAVENS
A GARDENER IS NEVER shut out from his garden, wherever he may be. Its comfort never fails. Though the city may close about him, and the grime and soot descend upon him, he can still wander in his garden, does he but close his eyes. (DTGP, 287)
·
&nbs
p; A GARDEN IS LIKE a school—it is a place of youth perpetually renewed—it arouses the same loyalties—it teaches the same lessons…. Just as a school is a place of slowly-expanding minds, of quiet adolescent dreams, of the play and inter-play of sweet friendship, so is a garden. (DTGP, 38)
YOU WILL FIND, as you wander through your garden life, that each form of gardening has its separate and peculiar charm—that one corner of your garden will evoke a mood quite distinct from that which pervades you in another. A large garden is like a large house, with rooms variously decorated. There are rooms which soothe and rooms which stimulate, rooms that are only made for work and rooms that are only made for play. (DTGP, 123)
FOR ALL THE joys that a garden can give you, the chief joy is the excitement which it adds to the wanderer’s return…. It must be sad to come home, if you have no garden waiting for you. For then, you have no alternative but to read the silly news-sheets instead of spending your time in the best of all ways, in looking out of the window. (AVIAV, 267–268)
TO HAVE POWER, if only for a few hours! That must be the longing of all ghosts who revisit their old homes, who see the havoc that is wreaked by the fools who come after them, who wail disconsolately through ravaged gardens and weep in despair over the woods that their descendants are destroying. For a few hours only, to come back, to issue orders, to set men to work, to enforce obedience, to start the business of salvage, to bring beauty once more into the desert that the others have made. (AVIAV, 283–284)