Read Ebook: The Book of Old-Fashioned Flowers And Other Plants Which Thrive in the Open-Air of England by Roberts Harry Roskruge Ethel Illustrator

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"A Queen Elizabeth in Phyllirea, a little inclining to the green sickness, but of full growth.

"An old maid of honour in wormwood.

"A topping Ben Jonson in Laurel.

"Divers eminent modern poets in bays."

The greatest joy which a garden can yield is a feeling of restfulness and peace, a feeling which no garden of staring beds and ostentatious splendour can afford, but which is yielded--as by nothing else in the world--by a garden of happy, homely, old-fashioned flowers.

To most people, and more particularly to most women, one of the chief uses or functions of a garden is to provide flowers to be cut for the decoration of rooms. But I hold that a flower cut from its plant and placed in a vase is as a scalp on the walls of a wigwam--a trophy showing how one more beautiful plant has been defeated and victimised by its powerful and tasteless owner. The cut flower is no longer part of a manifestation of the will of nature; rather it is a slave--beautiful, it may be, but branded and soul-destroyed.

Regarded as decoration, I consider cut flowers in a house much as fashion now looks on shell ornaments, or picture-frames made of acorns, as things inappropriate and childish. Of course, in a town there is some excuse for them, for even cut flowers carry the mind to beautiful associated conditions; but cut flowers in the country seem ludicrously like lumber, just as bedsteads and toilet-services and cruet-stands placed in a garden would be lumber too.

The love of cut flowers is really but another manifestation of the spirit which hankers after "yews carved into dragons, pagodas, marmosets," and the other tree-monsters scoffed at by Rousseau, who added that he was convinced that "the time is at hand, when we shall no longer have in gardens anything that is found in the country; we shall tolerate neither plants nor shrubs; we shall only like porcelain flowers, baboons, arbour-work, sand of all colours, and fine vases full of nothing."

Indeed, there is in many quarters even now a growing desire for the kind of "new garden," which old William Lawson advocated: "Your Gardiner can frame your lesser wood to the shape of men armed in the field, ready to give battell: or swift running Greyhounds: or of well sented and true running Hounds, to chase the Deere, or hunt the Hare. This kinde of hunting shall not waste your corne, nor much your coyne. Mazes well framed a man's height, may perhaps make your friend wander in gathering of berries, till he cannot recover himselfe without your helpe."

Of course, the cutting of flowers is a long way from this; still it is difficult to see where a line can be drawn once the worship of "gardeners' gardens" has begun.

Through the open windows of house or cottage the eyes should be able to feast on the beauty of freely growing flowers quite as easily as if they were cut and stuck in glass or porcelain vase like so many heads of traitors on the city gates.

It has been said that all children are born scientists, but that only a small number of them ever pass on to the condition of artists; and it has always seemed to me that there is much truth in the statement. Children are ever putting the eternal "why?" to the great confusion of their parents, pastors, and masters; and it is the curious, the gigantic, the rare, which always calls forth their attention and admiration. Struwelpeter is more to a child than all the beauties of a Charles Robinson, and to few men or women is it given to derive as much pleasure from beauty as from that which is usually called "interesting." Hence, the ordinary criticisms of gardens; hence, also, the usual aims of gardeners. So many people desire the gaudy, or the unique, or the curious, that we are apt to look upon gardens merely as appliances for the production of quaint or monstrous flowers.

The analysis of beauty has ever a dissecting-room-feel about it; still, as he who would become a skilful surgeon must be first a practical anatomist, and as he who would be a painter must first study his materials and the "dodges" of his craft, so must the would-be artist in gardening dissect the beauty of perfect gardens, and study such apparently dull materials as earth and manure, and practical garden books.

Country people often think that the way to enjoy London is to spend day and night in one continuous round of "sight" seeing. In like manner, people often have an idea that the perfect garden is a continuous sheet of wonderful flowers. How great is the fallacy contained in this idea it should be needless to point out. Leaf and stem, light and shade and fragrance, these are quite as essential parts of a garden as are the "blooms" of the gardening showman.

An eye for beauty is largely a product of training and experience. A soul and a brain there must be as a basis, but "taste" is to a large extent cultivated. One must have read much before one is able to appreciate the style of a Ruskin or a Pater, a Maeterlinck or a Le Gallienne; one must have studied many pictures before being able to realise the beauty of the works of the great artists; and in like manner one must needs have loved and watched plants long and steadfastly before the beauty of winter twig and summer leaf comes home to him.

Many a man with a garden looks upon winter as a season to be got through as soon as possible, as a season when nothing short of necessity shall drag him into the garden. I am sure that even in the very heart of December, one should find in the garden more of real beauty than ninety-nine gardens out of a hundred contain in June. I recall in particular one little heather path bordered by large bushes of blue-grey Lavender and green-grey Rosemary, in the bays being great Mullein plants and clumps of Pink and Alyssum. Ferns, Periwinkles, Holly, Satinleaf, Hellebores, Winter Aconites and Barberries are but a few of the plants which help to make this walk bright and pleasant even in the depths of winter; but most important of all in the Christmas display are the Furzes, single and double, than which, according to Mr Alfred Russell Wallace, the tropics can produce nothing more brilliant or more beautiful.

Continuous beauty all the year through, rather than a continuous display of flowers, is a goal at which gardeners might wisely aim, for not only is the result far more restful and suggestive of reserved force and becoming modesty, but also the individual plants are far more likely to have a fair chance of development at the hands of one who appreciates beautiful leaves and healthy growth, than when cultivated by one who looks at plants merely as flower-making machines.

A GARDEN BY THE SEA

It is fortunate that we are not all provided with equally favourable sites and soils. How monotonous would gardening become if one knew that he had but to act, deed for deed, as his neighbour in order to attain exactly the same garden result. We should feel disposed to throw down our spades and trowels if the end of our efforts might be foreseen by looking over our neighbour's boundary. If the difficulties to be overcome could be formally catalogued, the whole art of gardening would be reduced to a wooden system in which there would be little room for surprise or pleasure. But Fate has decreed that our gardens shall differ in spite of the apish copying spirit which still fills so many of our breasts. Our sites vary, our soils vary, and our atmospheric conditions vary to such an extent that any gardener, if he is to produce a result of any worth, must perforce use his native intelligence in order to overcome the specific difficulties peculiar to his plot of earth.

Gardening readers will remember Dean Hole's story of the enthusiastic flower-loving navvy who, obtaining the post of gatekeeper on the railway, was provided with nothing but a barren gravel pit as apology for a garden. "Twelve months afterwards," says the Dean, "I came near the place again--was it a mirage which I saw on the sandy desert? There were vegetables, fruit-bushes and fruit-trees, all in vigorous health; there were flowers, and the flower-queen in her beauty, 'Why, Will,' I exclaimed, 'what have you done to the gravel-bed?' 'Lor' bless yer,' he replied, grinning, 'I hadn't been here a fortnight afore I swopped it for a pond!' He had, as a further explanation informed me, and after an agreement with a neighbouring farmer, removed with pick and barrow his sandy stratum to the depth of three feet, wheeled it to the banks of an old pond, or rather to the margin of a cavity where a pond once was, but which had been gradually filled up with leaves and silt; and this rich productive mould he had brought home a distance of two hundred yards, replacing it with the gravel, and levelling as per contract."

That man's garden was a real living creation: it was indeed a "great work." And it is in everything true that great natural possessions, though they may render life more comfortable and possibly more apparently successful, yet make the battle the tamer and less interesting. Indeed the greater the odds to be overcome, the more magnificent will every victory appear, and the gardener who creates a flowery Eden out of a piece of bare and starving desert has scored a greater success than his who but grows beautiful flowers and delicious fruits where soil and site and surroundings have been entirely on his side.

I am writing in a garden which is as remarkable an example of difficulties overcome as was the garden of Dean Hole's navvy. Those who are familiar with the sand-dunes or towans which form so pronounced a feature of much of the northern coast-line of Cornwall, will realize that these scarcely afford ideal spots for easily made gardens. A thin coating of poor grass, reeds, wild thyme and occasional sea-hollies form the only drapery for the blown sand which makes up the whole body of soil.

Yet it was on such a spot that a friend of mine pitched his camp, or rather built his cottage, and set to work to create a garden. His aim in life being to kill care, he desired nothing more eagerly than to be constantly occupied. For three years he spent fully one half of his days in bringing into his territory leafmould and soil, clay and manure. He soon had a good protective screen of pines, euonymus, privet and hazel, and only then did he seriously begin to plant his garden. He had, during those three years, raised crops of clover, trifolium and the like, digging them again into the newly created soil from whence they came.

He read all the gardening books on which he could lay hands, he saw all the gardens within walking distance, and he studied the wants of every flower before he sowed or planted it, just as though it were an honoured guest whom he were inviting. He had no rule-and-compass scheme before his eyes, and planted his shrubs and flowers in those situations where they might most healthily yield their beauty and their fragrance. Such paths as his garden has are merely gravelled developments of the beaten tracks which usage indicated as necessary or convenient; and I am afraid that they would meet with the disapproval of that great authority, Mr Reginald Bloomfield, who has said that a garden "should be laid out in an equal number of rectangular plots where everything is straightforward and logical."

My friend is nearly twenty years older than when he began to create his garden, and it has already acquired much of the character of an old house to which successive additions have been made. The year through, the earth is draped and decorated with beautiful plants, Aconites, Snowdrops, Crocuses, Primroses, Violets, Fritillaries, Columbines, Pinks, Roses, Lilies, Sunflowers and all the host of old-fashioned flowers.

The great problems of "architectural" gardening, "landscape" gardening, and the rest, did not interest him. So simple and unpretentious was his little house that an attempt at terraces, clipped evergreens, and the like, would have struck a jarring note at once. Therefore, it is quite in keeping that beautiful flowers and beautiful shrubs border one's way right up to the entrance door; nor does Nature end there, for over all the outer walls are trained lovely and fragrant climbers--Clematis, Rose, and Honeysuckle--which give the idea that the cottage does indeed "nestle" in the garden.

Through the open windows also, at almost any time of the year, pours the delicious scent of leaf and flower--of Winter Sweet, Violets, or Sweet Peas; of Stocks, or Mignonette; of Wallflowers, or Roses. Just to name a few of the plants whose scent fill the rooms, what glories are thereby called up:--Honeysuckle and Jasmine, Lily of the Valley, Lilac and Narcissus, Carnation, Syringa and Heliotrope, Thyme, Bergamot, and Aloysia! These, and a hundred other fragrances mingled together in infinitely varying combinations, give sensuous joys which even the most jaded can but appreciate. For there is probably no pleasure so democratic as that which is yielded by the fragrance of flowers and leaves. The colour and form of plants require a little attention for their appreciation, but their odour overwhelms our senses whether we attend or no. The variety of perfumes yielded by plants is almost as great as their forms, for blossom of Apple and of Jonquil, leaf of Strawberry, Currant and Sweet Gale gives each an aesthetic pleasure peculiar to itself.

In Elizabethan times, a royal visit seems to have been preceded by a process of sweeting the house, which consisted in filling the rooms with scent of crushed leaves and flowers, scattering also extracts and essences of fragrant plants. This sweeting of the rooms is a continuous process through the open windows of the cottage, and no queenly visit would induce any augmentation of it.

Through the trees, which now have grown to moderate size, may always be seen the most beautiful setting which a beautiful garden can have--the ever restless sea. The contrast is good and effective, and is calculated to prevent any undue development of horticultural vanity.

I thought of Ruskin's statement that "the path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers, but they rise behind her steps, not before them," when one day I sat on a quaint old seat under a pear tree in this little flowerful garden; for it is literally behind his steps, not before them, that all the beauty of my friend's garden has sprung up. Each beautiful leaf and stem and flower are products of his labour and care almost as much as of sun and rain. Yet to a stranger the garden shows no sign of human fingers, human muscles, or human interference.

To many, possibly to most, there is attractiveness in a garden of well-kept, straight-bordered paths, of tidy beds symmetrical beyond reproach, of plants arranged like soldiers under review; but to me such gardens--however pleasant to look at--seem unsuited to repose and impossible to sit and dream in.

This garden is very different. It has no trees cut to the shape of peacocks or wind-mills, no hideous collection of stakes and raffia, which goes by the name of "the carnation bed" . It is merely a bit of enclosed and humanised natural beauty, a place where one may quietly enjoy delightful flowers and delightful fragrance without the jarring condition of viewing behind the scenes all the time that the performance is being enacted. Every flower in the garden was originally planted by my friend, and has been regularly watched over and tended by him ever since, yet not one but looks as though it had been planted at the creation of the world and had been subject only to the forces of Nature all its life. There is a suggestion of woodland, a suggestion of hedgerow, a suggestion of hillside, yet, of course, the garden differs from them all. It is the absence of bare earth--for scarcely one inch of soil lies undraped by plants--which partly gives the garden that feeling of settled-down-ness. A half-dressed person, a half-papered wall, a half-filled bookcase, a half-finished house--all these things hinder the feeling of repose. So it is that nearly all gardens, looking, as they do, to be in a state of preparation and incompleteness, make restfulness out of the question. But in this garden repose seems the natural emotion, and to sit there beneath a tree and read or chat is always the appropriate thing.

It is not, however, that the earth is all draped which alone causes the feeling of rest. This is due very largely to the fact that the garden is not a "show-garden," was not created for show, but for the satisfaction of its creator.

The "comfortable feel" of the garden is largely assisted also by the nature of the flowers and plants which he has elected to cultivate: Gilly-flowers, Pinks and Purple Columbines, Sweet Carnations, Daffodils and lov?d Lilies. To quote Korumushi, a poet of the race which has the spirit of flower-worship in its heart--

"No man so callous, but he heaves a sigh When o'er his head the withered Cherry-flowers Come fluttering down."

And no man is so devoid of feeling as to be unmoved by the sight of the flowers associated with the ideals of the race--the flowers which Chaucer loved, and Shakspere.

I have seen a beautiful garden, containing none but flowers mentioned by Shakspere. This, however, was after all but a piece of pretty pedantry, and necessitated the absence of Foxgloves, Forget-me-Nots, Snowdrops, and other beautiful flowers. It is indeed strange that he, the greatest poet of gardens as of other things, never mentions these flowers, although they must have been well known to him. Speaking of the Snowdrop, Gerard, who was a contemporary of Shakspere, said: "These plants doe grow wilde in Italy, and the parts adjacent, notwithstanding our London gardens have taken possession of most of them many years past." This rather indicates that the Snowdrop then held a very different place in the gardener's heart, from the place which it since has won; and doubtless the same holds good of the other flowers which Shakspere left unmentioned. If Shakspere were writing now, using the names of flowers as he used them--"not to show his own knowledge," but because the particular flowers supplied the appropriate simile or key to sentiment--he could scarcely fail to mention the Foxgloves or Lady's Fingers, the sweet Forget-Me-Nots, and, more beautiful still, the chaste, unflinching Snowdrops. A flower takes time--generations even, it may be--really to eat its way into the heart of man; for it is not enough that it be merely beautiful or merely fragrant--attractive to our senses though these properties are--in order that we may really become incorporate with a flower. But it must, in addition, be full of association, and have been long watched and lovingly studied. There is one book, difficult now to obtain, containing a record of the truest appreciation and most careful study of flowers, and of the beauty of flowers, which we have in the language. That book is called "Flowers and Gardens," by Dr Forbes Watson, and the following passage from its pages beautifully explains the sentiment of the gardener who grows mainly old-fashioned flowers, or, at any rate, flowers with which he has been long familiar--

"We make the acquaintance of any individual existence under an immense number of different aspects, and it is the sum of all these aspects which constitutes that existence to us. A Snowdrop, for instance, is not to me merely such a figure as a painter might give me by copying the flower when placed so that its loveliness shall be best apparent, but a curious mental combination or selection from the figures which the flower may present when placed in every possible position, and in every aspect which it has worn from birth to grave, and coloured by all the associations which have chanced to cling around it. To the bodily eye which beholds it for the first time it might be of no consequence what lay within the petals, though even then the imagination would be whispering some solution of the secret; but to the eye of mind, when the flower has been often seen, that hidden green and yellow which is necessary to complete the harmony becomes distinctly visible--visible, that is, in that strange, indefinite way in which all things, however apparently incompatible, seem present and blended together when the imaginative faculty is at work. The common Star of Bethlehem is a good illustration of the working of this principle. When I look at the beautiful silver-white of the inner surface of the petals, my mind is always dwelling upon and rejoicing in the fact that their outer side is green, though of that green outside I cannot see a hair's breadth. Again, we find the same principle at work in the feeling which compelled the old sculptors to finish the hidden side of the statue. They said, 'For the gods are everywhere.'"

In spite of Shakspere's omission, then, I advise everyone to grow many species of Snowdrops; indeed, for a week or two in February, my friend's sea-side garden seems to be all draped with their green leaves and serene green-white "drops," yet not one podgy, graceless double flower is there among them all. For he agrees with Forbes Watson that the "doubling" of beautiful flowers generally results in deformity and the destruction of all beauty and meaning. Double Roses, Pinks, and Carnations, he grows of course; for their fragrance, their history, and, in the case of Roses, their continuous bloom compensate to some extent for the loss of character in the petals, and for the "pen-wiper" appearance which has only too often been given to the individual flowers.

To return to the Shakspere garden, one finds that Shakspere's floral year practically began with the Daffodil.

"When Daffodils begin to peer, With heigh! the doxy o'er the dale, Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year."

The garden of my friend is a "pleasant" garden, and he, too, is a "curious searcher" of beautiful and pleasant plants. That is why his garden seems to be an old-fashioned garden, and not because it is at all like Shakspere's garden, or Mary Arden's garden, or the hideous Elizabethan gardens pictured in the "Hortus Floridus," published in 1614. His, though not by any means a Tottenham Court Road product, is no Wardour Street garden, but is old-fashioned in the sense that some of Heal's bedsteads are old-fashioned, or that beautiful English prose is old-fashioned as contrasted with the English of the yellow press.

He would not be without his Snowdrops, and quite as emphatically would he not be without his Crocuses. Great clumps everywhere, among the shrubs, at roots of trees and by the path-sides, radiate light and beauty like so many fairyland flashes. First come the violet cups of Crocus imperati, often before January has passed; then the brilliant array of yellow Crocus luteus , followed by Crocuses of every shade of purple, lavender, and white. These, like the Snowdrops, are left quite undisturbed year after year, and if there be some little falling off in the size of the flowers, which is doubtful, there is more than compensation in the added beauty which the resulting gradation of colour and natural grouping yield. When I think of these glories, I can but reflect on how much beauty that academic "Shakspere-garden" goes lacking. Indeed, we shall all do well to steer clear of formulas and rigidity, as well in our lives as in our garden-beds.

COTTAGE GARDENS

The term "cottage garden" is an elastic one, and may be made to include all that big class of gardens where, in the words of the flower-show schedule, "no regular gardener is employed." But I think that most people, when they think of cottage gardens, picture to themselves those little wayside plots attached to the homes of working folks which cheer the passer-by nearly as much as they cheer their owners. One thinks of Rose and Clematis climbing over the doorway, of Sweet-Williams, Paeonies, Hollyhocks, Sunflowers and Pansies flowering in bed or border. Old-fashioned herbaceous plants are those which one associates with these cottage gardens, and nearly the year through one expects to find something of interest and of beauty.

Such is the ideal; sometimes such is the reality.

In some of our rural districts, where the local squire is of the resident benevolent feudal school, the cottages are surrounded by little paradises of flowery beauty. Those who have travelled through the Porlock Estate of the Acland family will know what I mean. In many places, however, little pride or interest is taken in gardening, and the yards fronting the cottages are dull and dismal from January to Christmas. Indeed, there are few districts where pretty cottage gardens are the rule.

Yet it were as easy to create a lovely picture within an area of twenty square yards as in the space of a palace garden, though possibly not so imposing or valuable an one. The size of the canvas is a detail; the other limitations are, however, more important. In a little plot we must often do without those lovely backgrounds of tree and shrub and those lovely foregrounds of grass or other dwarf herbage which are such helps in creating great garden pictures. It is at a sonnet that we small gardeners must aim and not at an epic or great narrative poem. Yet I often feel that brevity is of the very essence of fine poetry, and it is possible that limitation of space may be contributory to the finest expression of gardening. At all events, it affords a greater test of one's skill and taste as a gardening craftsman, for, whereas, in a big place, trees, shrubs and lawn almost create a beautiful garden of themselves, in a little garden we have to practise more selection and more rejection, and to exercise greater judgment and care in arrangement, since here every detail counts and every fault jars.

The cottage gardener has usually to employ the simplest flowers wherewith to express himself, but it is probable that this limitation is helpful rather than a source of increased difficulty. He may say, in the spirit of Lewis Carroll:--

"I never loved a dear gazelle, Nor anything that cost me much: High prices profit those that sell, But why should I be fond of such?"

And these old common plants thrive as well and flower as beautifully in the garden of the shepherd as in the grounds of Windsor Castle. The wind blows from the same quarter, the rain falls equally, and the frost is as severe in the one as in the other.

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