Gertrude Jekyll

“ The red Rose does not flower so freely here as on a pillar in sunlight, but its fewer stems clamber high into the Holly and the bloom shows in thin natural wreaths that are even more pleasing to an artist's eye than the more ordered abundance of the flowery post. At the foot of the Hollies hardy Ferns grow luxuriantly in the constant shade. A little later a few clumps of Lilies will spring up from among them; the lovely pink rubellum, the fine yellow szovitzianum, and the buff testaceum. ”

“ Surely my fruit garden would be not only a place of beauty, of pleasant sight and pleasant thought, but of leisurely repose, a repose broken only faintly and in welcome fashion by its own interests—in July, August and September a goodly place in which to wander and find luscious fruits in quantity that can be gathered and eaten straight from the tree. There is a pleasure in searching for and eating fruit in this way that is far better than having it picked by the gardener and brought in and set before one on a dish in a tame room. ”

“ The rest of the background above eye-level is of the warm bud-colour of the summer-leafing trees, and, below, the fading rust of the now nearly flattened fronds of last year's Bracken, and the still paler drifts of leaves from neighbouring Oaks and Chestnuts. The sunlight strikes brightly on the silver stems of the Birches, and casts their shadows clear-cut across the grassy woodland ride. The grass is barely green as yet, but has the faint winter green of herbage not yet grown and still powdered with the short remnants of the fine-leaved, last-year-mown heath grasses. ”

“ Merely having them, or having them planted unassorted in garden spaces, is only like having a box of paints from the best colourman, or, to go one step further, it is like having portions of these paints set out upon a palette. This does not constitute a picture; and it seems to me that the duty we owe to our gardens and to our own bettering in our gardens is so to use the plants that they shall form beautiful pictures; and that, while delighting our eyes, they should be always training those eyes to a more exalted criticism ”

“ The beautiful White Lily cannot be grown in the hot sandy soil of my garden. Even if its place be ever so well prepared with the loam and lime that it loves, the surrounding soil-influences seem to rob it of its needful nourishment; it makes a miserable show for one year and never appears again. The only way to grow it is in pots or tubs sunk in the soil. For some years I had wished to have an orderly planting of this lovely Lily in the lower border at the back of the Andromeda just in front of the Briars. ”

“ Even a proficiency in some branch of fine art does not necessarily imply ability to lay out ground. I have known, in the intimate association of half a lifetime, a landscape painter, whose interpretation of natural beauty was of the most refined and poetical quality, and who truly loved flowers and beautiful vegetation, but who was quite incapable of personally arranging a garden; although it is more usual that an artist should almost unconsciously place plants well. ”

“ One cannot write of the garden in July without a word of the Roses. Besides the bushy garden Roses, and the kinds of special charm, such as Damask, Provence, Moss and China, those that most nearly concern the garden for beauty and pictorial effect are the rambling and climbing Roses that flower in clusters. ”

“ This filling with the strong, rich colouring has the natural effect of making the eye eagerly desirous for the complementary colour, so that, standing by the inner Yew arch and suddenly turning to look into the Grey garden, the effect is surprisingly—quite astonishingly—luminous and refreshing. One never knew before how vividly bright Ageratum could be, or Lavender or Nepeta; even the grey-purple of Echinops appears to have more positive colour than one's expectation would assign to it. ”

“ It will grow in almost any way, and is delightful in all; as a pillar, as a hedge, as a bush, as a big cottage standard, or in the border tumbling about among early summer flowers. Like the Blush Gallica, which just precedes it in time of blooming, it is one of the old picture Roses. Both should be in quantity in every garden, and yet they are but rarely seen.
The border next the paving has clumps of the old garden Peonies (P. officinalis) . By the time these are over, towards the end of June, groups of the earlier orange Herring Lilies are in bloom. ”

“ It is therefore not to be expected that it is enough to buy good plants and merely to tell the gardener of average ability to plant them in groups, as is now often done with the very best intention. It is impossible for the gardener to know what is meant. In all the cases that have come under my notice, where such indefinite instruction has been given, the things have been planted in stiff blocks. Quite lately I came upon such an example in the garden of a friend who is by no means without a sense of beauty. ”

“ Surely the business of the blue garden is to be beautiful as well as to be blue. My own idea is that it should be beautiful first, and then just as blue as may be consistent with its best possible beauty. Moreover, any experienced colourist knows that the blues will be more telling—more purely blue—by the juxtaposition of rightly placed complementary colour. ”

“ But before the last turn there is a pleasant mass of colour showing in the wood-edge on the dead-leaf carpet. It is a straggling group of Daphne Mezereon, with some clumps of red Lent Hellebores, and, to the front, some half-connected patches of the common Dog-tooth Violet. The nearly related combination of colour is a delight to the trained colour-eye. There is nothing brilliant; it is all restrained, refined, in harmony with the veiled light that reaches the flowers through the great clumps of Hollies and tall half-overhead Chestnuts and neighbouring Beech. ”

“ Behind the Cistuses would be White Broom, finely green-stemmed in winter. There would even be shrubs in flower; the thick-set yellowish bloom of Witch Hazel (Hamamelis) and the bright yellow of Jasminum nudiflorum. Then groups of Junipers, and all the ground carpeted with Heath, and so to the upper Fir-wood. Then, after the comforting greenery of the lower region, the lovely colour of distant winter landscape would be intensely enjoyable; for the greys and purples of the leafless woodland of middle distance have a beauty that no summer137 landscape can show. ”

“ Where this path begins the lawn ends at a group of Oak, Holly and Cistus, with an undergrowth of Gaultheria and Andromeda. The larger trees are to the left and the small evergreen shrubs on a rocky mound to the right. Within a few yards the turf path becomes a true wood path. Just as wild gardening should never look like garden gardening, or, as it so sadly often does, like garden plants gone astray and quite out of place, so wood paths should never look like garden paths. There must be no hard edges, no conscious boundaries. ”

“ If it is open enough to allow of the growth of grass, and the grass has to be cut, and is cut with a machine, then a man with a faghook must follow to cut away slantingly the hard edge of standing grass that is left on each side. For the track of the machine not only leaves the hard, unlovely edges, but also brings into the wood the incongruous sentiment of that discipline of trimness which belongs to the garden, and that, even there in its own place, is often overdone. ”

“ For the beautiful growth of the future wood was the thing that mattered, rather than obedience to any inflexible law.
Now, after twenty years, the saplings have become trees and the preponderance of one kind of tree at a time has given a feeling of repose and dignity. Here and there something exceptional occurs, but it causes interest, not confusion. Five woodland walks pass upward through the trees; every one has its own character, while its details change during the progress—never abruptly but in leisurely sequence ”

“ To plant and maintain a flower-border, with a good scheme for colour, is by no means the easy thing that is commonly supposed.
I believe that the only way in which it can be made successful is to devote certain borders to certain times of year; each border or garden region to be bright for from one to three months.
Nothing seems to me more unsatisfactory than the border that in spring shows a few patches of flowering bulbs in ground otherwise looking empty, or with tufts of herbaceous plants just coming through. Then the bulbs die down, and their place is wanted for something that comes later. ”

“ I would have great groups of Yucca standing up against the sky and others in the rock-face, and some bushes of this great Euphorbia and only a few other plants, all of rather large grey effect; Phlomis, Lavender, Rosemary and Cistus, with Othonna hanging down in long sheets over the bare face of the warm rock. It would be a rock-garden on an immense scale, planted as Nature plants, with not many different things at a time. The restriction to a few kinds of plants would give the impression of spontaneous growth ”

“ The bright, harsh green on the woodwork makes the colour of the foliage look dull and ineffective. It would be desirable, in the case of solitary tub plants, to study the exact colour that would be most becoming to the flower and foliage; but as it is needful, to avoid a patchy appearance, to paint the whole of the tubs in any one garden-scheme the same colour, a tint should be chosen that is quiet in itself and that is lower in tone than the dullest of the foliage in any of the examples. ”

“ The common Laurel is generally seen as a long-suffering garden hack, put to all sorts of rather ignoble uses. It is so cheap to buy, so quick of growth, and so useful as an easily made screen that its better use is, except in rare instances, lost sight of. Planted in thin woodland and never pruned, it grows into a small tree that takes curious ways and shapes of trunk and branch of a character that is remarkably pictorial. ”

“ Between the clumps of Belladonna are bushes of white Lavender, and the whole is carpeted and edged with the white foliage of Artemisia stelleriana, the quite hardy plant that is such a good substitute for the tenderer Cineraria maritima.
Among the best flowers of July that have a place in this garden are the Pentstemons planted last year. We grow them afresh from cuttings every autumn, planting them out in April. They are not quite hardy, and a bad winter may destroy all the last year's plants. ”

“ Some region on the outskirts of the garden, and between it and woodland, would be the most desirable. If well done the sense of wintry discomfort would disappear, for nearly all the growing things would be at their best, and even in summer, shrubs and plants can do no more than this. In summer, too, it would be good to see, for the green things would have such an interplanting of free Roses, Jasmines, Clematis, Honeysuckles, Forsythia, and so on, as would make charming incidents of flower-beauty. ”

“ For a love of flowers, of any kind, however shallow, is a sentiment that makes for human sympathy and kindness, and is in itself uplifting, as everything must be that is a source of reverence and admiration. Still, the object of this book is to draw attention, however slightly and imperfectly, to the better ways of gardening, and to bring to bear upon the subject some consideration of that combination of common sense, sense of beauty and artistic knowledge that can make plain ground and growing things into a year-long succession of living pictures. ”

“ THE GREY GARDEN.
THE BLUE GARDEN.
THE GREEN GARDEN.
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The strength of colour and degree of variation is so great that it is well worth going to a nursery to pick out all these gold-variegated plants. It is not enough to tell the gardener to get them. There should be fervour on the part of the garden's owner such as will take him on a gold-plant pilgrimage to all good nurseries within reach, or even to some rather out of reach. No good gardening comes of not taking pains. All good gardening is the reward of well-directed and strongly sustained effort. ”

“ The Hidden Garden is so small in extent, and its boundaries are already so well grown, that there is no room for many of the beautiful things of the time of year. For May is the time for the blooming of the most important of our well-known flowering shrubs—Lilac, Guelder Rose, White Broom, Laburnum, and Pyrus Malus floribunda. But one shrub, as beautiful as any of these and as easily grown, seems to be forgotten. This is Exochorda grandiflora—related to the Spiræas. ”

“ Just below this is a clump of the Double Meadowsweet, a mass of warm white flower-foam. Intergrouped are tall Snapdragons, white and palest yellow. Then forward are the pale blue-green sword-blades of Iris pallida dalmatica that flowered in June. This is one of the few Irises admitted to the border, but it is here because it has the quality, rare among its kind, of maintaining its great leaves in beauty to near the end of the year. Quite to the front are lower growing plants of purest blue—the Cape Daisy (Agathea cœlestis) and blue Lobelia. ”

“ Of course one has to remember that there are many minds to which this need of an artist's treatment of garden and woodland does not appeal, just as there are some who do not care for music or for poetry, or who see no difference between the sculpture of the old Greeks and that of any modern artist who is not of the first rank, or to whom architectural refinement is as an unknown language. ”

“ For my own part I like to give a house, whatever its size or style, some dominant note in wall-planting. In my own home, which is a house of the large cottage class, the prevailing wall-growths are Vines and Figs in the south and west, and, in a shady northward facing court between two projecting wings, Clematis montana on the two cooler sides, and again a Vine upon the other. At one angle on the warmer side of the house where the height to the eaves is not great, China Roses have been trained up, and Rosemary, which clothes the whole foot of the wall, is here encouraged to rise with it. ”

“ There is also such rich promise of flower-beauty to come that the mind is filled with glad anticipation, besides feeling content for the time being with what it has before it. There is one item of colouring that strikes the trained eye as specially delightful. It is a bushy mass of Clematis recta, now out of bloom. It occurs between the overhanging purple Clematis and the nearer groups of Cineraria maritima and Santolina. ”

“ When one sees climbing plants or any of the shrubs that are so often used as climbers, planted in the usual way on a house or wall, about four feet apart and with no attempt at arrangement, it gives one that feeling of regret for opportunities lost or misused that is the sentiment most often aroused in the mind of the garden critic in the great number of pleasure-grounds that are planted without thought or discernment. ”

“ As in all matters relating to design in gardening, the good placing of plants in detail is a matter of knowledge of an artistic character. The shaping of every group of plants, to have the best effect, should not only be definitely intended but should be done with an absolute conviction by the hand that feels the drawing that the group must have in relation to what is near, or to the whole form of the clump or border or whatever the nature of the place may be. ”