Authors: Margery Fish
We Made a Garden (16 page)
One of the most delightful things about gardening is the free masonry it gives with other gardeners, and the interest and pleasure all gardeners get by visiting other people’s gardens. We all have a lot to learn and in every new garden there is a chance of finding inspiration—new flowers, different arrangement or fresh treatment for old subjects. Even if it is a garden you know by heart there are twelve months in the year and every month means a different garden, and the discovery of things unexpected all the rest of the year.
I have never yet been to a garden that hasn’t given me some new ideas, and it is surprising how you find most interesting things in gardens that you wouldn’t suspect held any secrets. There was a tiny little slip of a garden in front of a cottage in this village that was full of the lovely
Corydalis solida
, something you normally find only in a connoisseur’s garden. Once at a church fete in a rectory garden I came on a large bed of
Venstemon conlertus caeruleus.
It was in the garden that friends of mine rented at Charmouth that I first met my treasured othonnopsis, and that one small cutting has made hundreds of plants for me and my friends. Except for that unusual plant the garden was of no interest whatsoever. It was exciting to find that pink charmer, felicia, in another friend’s garden and better still when I was offered seedlings of it. Now I have to be rather firm with the lady as she thinks that parts of my garden belong to her and her only, but I’d hate to be without her.
One isn’t always lucky enough to get plants but ideas are available for anyone who wants to take them. There is a garden I know nearly as well as my own. One day in the spring I noticed what I thought was a new plant. It was used as an edging and was covered with delicate little pale yellow flowers, on wiry stems. But on enquiry I found it was no newcomer but our old friend epimedium with the foliage cut off. We grow this plant for its lovely leaves and tend to forget how lovely the flowers can be. By the time they come out the foliage is tattered and shabby and it is sensible to remove it so
that the full beauty of the flowers and the new leaves, in palest green, pink tinged, can have the stage.
In the same garden I realized how kind and softening stoechas lavender can be if planted to blur the hard lines of stone work. Here wide steps led up to a terrace on which is a large stone basin. The lazy growth and hazy colouring of the lavender give a peaceful feeling of permanence and grace. Stonework can be rather uncompromising at times but careful planting humanizes it.
I adopted this idea in my own garden. It was suggested to me that an old stone seat would look right on my terrace, and at the time all I could find for the purpose was an old stone sink. The front part was cut away and it was hoisted on two rather solid blocks of stone, but it looked clumsy and uncouth, and I really couldn’t bear to look at it until it was partly hidden by growing things. A huge plant of
Statice latifolia
in the foreground gives bold foliage all the year round and in the summer a cloud of soft blue. Again rosemary has come to the rescue, and a prostrate cupressus makes a swirl of grey-green against the hard stone. A downy mat of
Stachys lanata
is spreading pleasantly towards the seat and, what is even better, I see tiny seedlings appearing in tinier cracks in the paving. Kind nature is doing the job for me, in a gentle haphazard way which is much more pleasing than my more deliberate efforts.
Another gardening friend gave me the idea for one of my most successful plantings. On the left of the little crazy path that leads to the barton the higher ground is held up by a stone wall. At one spot the ground behind is level with the wall, and it was here that I planted a
Cytisus kewensis
to spread across the bed and pour down the wall. I look forward each year to the moment when that corner becomes a sheet of deep cream, a haze of forget-me-nots nearby and nepeta and roses in the background, all smiling and shining in the spring sunshine. It even excites people who are not gardeners and know nothing about gardening.
The same friend suggested I plant
Euphorbia Wulfenii
in the top terrace, as a screen and for emphasis. Again it was a stroke of genius. Never have I seen this spurge so happy and luxuriant, and in that position none of the beauty of its magnificence is lost.
I could go on and on. But that is just what gardening is, going on and on. My philistine of a husband often told with amusement how a cousin when asked when he expected to finish his garden replied ‘Never, I hope’. And that, I think, applies to all true gardeners.