Wood and Garden Part 13

Pheasants are very bad gardeners; what they seem to enjoy most are Crocuses--in fact, it is no use planting them. I had once a nice collection of Crocus species. They were in separate patches, all along the edge of one border, in a sheltered part of the garden, where pheasants did not often come. One day when I came to see my Crocuses, I found where each patch had been a basin-shaped excavation and a few fragments of stalk or some part of the plant. They had begun at one end and worked steadily along, clearing them right out. They also destroyed a long bed of _Anemone fulgens_. First they took the flowers, and then the leaves, and lastly pecked up and ate the roots.

But we have one grand consolation in having no slugs, at least hardly any that are truly indigenous; they do not like our dry, sandy heaths.

Friends are very generous in sending them with plants, so that we have a moderate number that hang about frames and pot plants, though nothing much to boast of; but they never trouble seedlings in the open ground, and for this I can never be too thankful.

Alas that the beautiful bullfinch should be so dire an enemy to fruit-trees, and also the pretty little t.i.ts! but so it is; and it is a sad sight to see a well-grown fruit-tree with all its fruit-buds pecked out and lying under it on the ground in a thin green carpet. We had some fine young cherry-trees in a small orchard that we cut down in despair after they had been growing twelve years. They were too large to net, and their s.p.a.ce could not be spared just for the mischievous fun of the birds.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE BEDDING FAs.h.i.+ON AND ITS INFLUENCE

It is curious to look back at the old days of bedding-out, when that and that only meant gardening to most people, and to remember how the fas.h.i.+on, beginning in the larger gardens, made its way like a great inundating wave, submerging the lesser ones, and almost drowning out the beauties of the many little flowery cottage plots of our English waysides. And one wonders how it all came about, and why the bedding system, admirable for its own purpose, should have thus outstepped its bounds, and have been allowed to run riot among gardens great and small throughout the land. But so it was, and for many years the fas.h.i.+on, for it was scarcely anything better, reigned supreme.

It was well for all real lovers of flowers when some quarter of a century ago a strong champion of the good old flowers arose, and fought strenuously to stay the devastating tide, and to restore the healthy liking for the good old garden flowers. Many soon followed, and now one may say that all England has flocked to the standard. Bedding as an all-prevailing fas.h.i.+on is now dead; the old garden-flowers are again honoured and loved, and every encouragement is freely offered to those who will improve old kinds and bring forward others.

And now that bedding as a fas.h.i.+on no longer exists, one can look at it more quietly and fairly, and see what its uses really are, for in its own place and way it is undoubtedly useful and desirable. Many great country-houses are only inhabited in winter, then perhaps for a week or two at Easter, and in the late summer. There is probably a house-party at Easter, and a succession of visitors in the late summer. A brilliant garden, visible from the house, dressed for spring and dressed for early autumn, is exactly what is wanted--not necessarily from any special love of flowers, but as a kind of bright and well-kept furnis.h.i.+ng of the immediate environment of the house. The gardener delights in it; it is all routine work; so many hundreds or thousands of scarlet Geranium, of yellow Calceolaria, of blue Lobelia, of golden Feverfew, or of other coloured material. It wants no imagination; the comprehension of it is within the range of the most limited understanding; indeed its prevalence for some twenty years or more must have had a deteriorating influence on the whole cla.s.s of private gardeners, presenting to them an ideal so easy of attainment and so cheap of mental effort.

But bedding, though it is gardening of the least poetical or imaginative kind, can be done badly or beautifully. In the _parterre_ of the formal garden it is absolutely in place, and brilliantly-beautiful pictures can be made by a wise choice of colouring. I once saw, and can never forget, a bedded garden that was a perfectly satisfying example of colour-harmony; but then it was planned by the master, a man of the most refined taste, and not by the gardener. It was a _parterre_ that formed part of the garden in one of the fine old places in the Midland counties. I have no distinct recollection of the design, except that there was some principle of fan-shaped radiation, of which each extreme angle formed one centre. The whole garden was treated in one harmonious colouring of full yellow, orange, and orange-brown; half-hardy annuals, such as French and African Marigolds, Zinnias, and Nasturtiums, being freely used. It was the most n.o.ble treatment of one limited range of colouring I have ever seen in a garden; brilliant without being garish, and sumptuously gorgeous without the reproach of gaudiness--a precious lesson in temperance and restraint in the use of the one colour, and an admirable exposition of its powerful effect in the hands of a true artist.

I think that in many smaller gardens a certain amount of bedding may be actually desirable; for where the owner of a garden has a special liking for certain cla.s.ses or mixtures of plants, or wishes to grow them thoroughly well and enjoy them individually to the full, he will naturally grow them in separate beds, or may intentionally combine the beds, if he will, into some form of good garden effect. But the great fault of the bedding system when at its height was, that it swept over the country as a tyrannical fas.h.i.+on, that demanded, and for the time being succeeded in effecting, the exclusion of better and more thoughtful kinds of gardening; for I believe I am right in saying that it spread like an epidemic disease, and raged far and wide for nearly a quarter of a century.

Its worst form of all was the "ribbon border," generally a line of scarlet Geranium at the back, then a line of Calceolaria, then a line of blue Lobelia, and lastly, a line of the inevitable Golden Feather Feverfew, or what our gardener used to call Featherfew. Could anything be more tedious or more stupid? And the ribbon border was at its worst when its lines were not straight, but waved about in weak and silly sinuations.

And when bedding as a fas.h.i.+on was dead, when this false G.o.d had been toppled off his pedestal, and his wors.h.i.+ppers had been converted to better beliefs, in turning and rending him they often went too far, and did injustice to the innocent by professing a dislike to many a good plant, and renouncing its use. It was not the fault of the Geranium or of the Calceolaria that they had been grievously misused and made to usurp too large a share of our garden s.p.a.ces. Not once but many a time my visitors have expressed unbounded surprise when they saw these plants in my garden, saying, "I should have thought that you would have despised Geraniums." On the contrary, I love Geraniums. There are no plants to come near them for pot, or box, or stone basket, or for ma.s.sing in any sheltered place in hottest suns.h.i.+ne; and I love their strangely-pleasant smell, and their beautiful modern colourings of soft scarlet and salmon-scarlet and salmon-pink, some of these grouping beautifully together. I have a s.p.a.ce in connection with some formal stonework of steps, and tank, and paved walks, close to the house, on purpose for the summer placing of large pots of Geranium, with sometimes a few Cannas and Lilies. For a quarter of the year it is one of the best things in the garden, and delightful in colour. Then no plant does so well or looks so suitable in some earthen pots and boxes from Southern Italy that I always think the best that were ever made, their shape and well-designed ornament traditional from the Middle Ages, and probably from an even more remote antiquity.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GERANIUMS IN NEAPOLITAN POTS.]

There are, of course, among bedding Geraniums many of a bad, raw quality of colour, particularly among cold, hard pinks, but there are so many to choose from that these can easily be avoided.

I remember some years ago, when the bedding fas.h.i.+on was going out, reading some rather heated discussions in the gardening papers about methods of planting out and arranging various tender but indispensable plants. Some one who had been writing about the errors of the bedding system wrote about planting some of these in isolated ma.s.ses. He was pounced upon by another, who asked, "What is this but bedding?" The second writer was so far justified, in that it cannot be denied that any planting in beds is bedding. But then there is bedding and bedding--a right and a wrong way of applying the treatment. Another matter that roused the combative spirit of the captious critic was the filling up of bare s.p.a.ces in mixed borders with Geraniums, Calceolarias, and other such plants. Again he said, "What is this but bedding? These are bedding plants." When I read this it seemed to me that his argument was, These plants may be very good plants in themselves, but because they have for some years been used wrongly, therefore they must not now be used rightly! In the case of my own visitors, when they have expressed surprise at my having "those horrid old bedding plants" in my garden, it seemed quite a new view when I pointed out that bedding plants were only pa.s.sive agents in their own misuse, and that a Geranium was a Geranium long before it was a bedding plant! But the discussion raised in my mind a wish to come to some conclusion about the difference between bedding in the better and worse sense, in relation to the cases quoted, and it appeared to me to be merely in the choice between right and wrong placing--placing monotonously or stupidly, so as merely to fill the s.p.a.ce, or placing with a feeling for "drawing" or proportion. For I had very soon found out that, if I had a number of things to plant anywhere, whether only to fill up a border or as a detached group, if I placed the things myself, carefully exercising what power of discrimination I might have acquired, it looked fairly right, but that if I left it to one of my garden people (a thing I rarely do) it looked all nohow, or like bedding in the worst sense of the word.

[Ill.u.s.tration: s.p.a.cE IN STEP AND TANK-GARDEN FOR LILIES, CANNAS, AND GERANIUMS.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: HYDRANGEAS IN TUBS, IN A PART OF THE SAME GARDEN.]

Even the better ways of gardening do not wholly escape the debasing influence of fas.h.i.+on. Wild gardening is a delightful, and in good hands a most desirable, pursuit, but no kind of gardening is so difficult to do well, or is so full of pitfalls and of paths of peril. Because it has in some measure become fas.h.i.+onable, and because it is understood to mean the planting of exotics in wild places, unthinking people rush to the conclusion that they can put any garden plants into any wild places, and that that is wild gardening. I have seen woody places that were already perfect with their own simple charm just muddled and spoilt by a reckless planting of garden refuse, and heathy hillsides already sufficiently and beautifully clothed with native vegetation made to look lamentably silly by the planting of a nurseryman's mixed lot of exotic Conifers.

In my own case, I have always devoted the most careful consideration to any bit of wild gardening I thought of doing, never allowing myself to decide upon it till I felt thoroughly a.s.sured that the place seemed to ask for the planting in contemplation, and that it would be distinctly a gain in pictorial value; so there are stretches of Daffodils in one part of the copse, while another is carpeted with Lily of the Valley. A cool bank is covered with Gaultheria, and just where I thought they would look well as little jewels of beauty, are spreading patches of Trillium and the great yellow Dog-tooth Violet. Besides these there are only some groups of the Giant Lily. Many other exotic plants could have been made to grow in the wooded ground, but they did not seem to be wanted; I thought where the copse looked well and complete in itself it was better left alone.

But where the wood joins the garden some bold groups of flowering plants are allowed, as of Mullein in one part and Foxglove in another; for when standing in the free part of the garden, it is pleasant to project the sight far into the wood, and to let the garden influences penetrate here and there, the better to join the one to the other.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MULLEIN (VERBASc.u.m PHLOMOIDES) AT THE EDGE OF THE FIR WOOD.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A GRa.s.s PATH IN THE COPSE.]

Under the Bracken in both pictures is a wide planting of Lily of the Valley, flowering in May before the Fern is up. (_See page 61._)

CHAPTER XXIV

MASTERS AND MEN

Now that the owners of good places are for the most part taking a newly-awakened and newly-educated pleasure in the better ways of gardening, a frequent source of difficulty arises from the ignorance and obstructiveness of gardeners. The owners have become aware that their gardens may be sources of the keenest pleasure. The gardener may be an excellent man, perfectly understanding the ordinary routine of garden work; he may have been many years in his place; it is his settled home, and he is getting well on into middle life; but he has no understanding of the new order of things, and when the master, perfectly understanding what he is about, desires that certain things shall be done, and wishes to enjoy the pleasure of directing the work himself, and seeing it grow under his hand, he resents it as an interference, and becomes obstructive, or does what is required in a spirit of such sullen acquiescence that it is equal to open opposition. And I have seen so many gardens and gardeners that I have come to recognise certain types; and this one, among men of a certain age, is unfortunately frequent.

Various degrees of ignorance and narrow-mindedness must no doubt be expected among the cla.s.s that produces private gardeners. Their general education is not very wide to begin with, and their training is usually all in one groove, and the many who possess a full share of vanity get to think that, because they have exhausted the obvious sources of experience that have occurred within their reach, there is nothing more to learn, or to know, or to see, or to feel, or to enjoy. It is in this that the difficulty lies. The man has no doubt done his best through life; he has performed his duties well and faithfully, and can render a good account of his stewards.h.i.+p. It is no fault of his that more means of enlarging his mind have not been within his grasp, and, to a certain degree, he may be excused for not understanding that there is anything beyond; but if he is naturally vain and stubborn his case is hopeless.

If, on the other hand, he is wise enough to know that he does not know everything, and modest enough to acknowledge it, as do all the greatest and most learned of men, he will then be eager to receive new and enlarged impressions, and his willing and intelligent co-operation will be a new source of interest in life both to himself and his employer, as well as a fresh spring of vitality in the life of the garden. I am speaking of the large middle cla.s.s of private gardeners, not of those of the highest rank, who have among them men of good education and a large measure of refinement. From among these I think of the late Mr. Ingram of the Belvoir Castle gardens, with regret as for a personal friend, and also as of one who was a true garden artist.

But most people who have fair-sized gardens have to do with the middle cla.s.s of gardener, the man of narrow mental training. The master who, after a good many years of active life, is looking forward to settling in his home and improving and enjoying his garden, has had so different a training, a course of teaching so immeasurably wider and more enlightening. As a boy he was in a great public school, where, by wholesome friction with his fellows, he had any petty or personal nonsense knocked out of him while still in his early "teens." Then he goes to college, and whether studiously inclined or not, he is already in the great world, always widening his ideas and experience. Then perhaps he is in one of the active professions, or engaged in scientific or intellectual research, or in diplomacy, his ever-expanding intelligence rubbing up against all that is most enlightened and astute in men, or most profoundly inexplicable in matter. He may be at the same time cultivating his taste for literature and the fine arts, searching the libraries and galleries of the civilised world for the n.o.blest and most divinely-inspired examples of human work, seeing with an eye that daily grows more keenly searching, and receiving and holding with a brain that ever gains a firmer grasp, and so acquires some measure of the higher critical faculty. He sees the ruined gardens of antiquity, colossal works of the rulers of Imperial Rome, and the later gardens of the Middle Ages (direct descendants of those greater and older ones), some of them still among the most beautiful gardens on earth. He sees how the taste for gardening grew and travelled, spreading through Europe and reaching England, first, no doubt, through her Roman invaders. He becomes more and more aware of what great and enduring happiness may be enjoyed in a garden, and how all that he can learn of it in the leisure intervals of his earlier maturity, and then in middle life, will help to brighten his later days, when he hopes to refine and make better the garden of the old home by a reverent application of what he has learnt.

He thinks of the desecrated old bowling-green, cut up to suit the fas.h.i.+on of thirty years ago into a patchwork of incoherent star and crescent shaped beds; of how he will give it back its ancient character of unbroken repose; he thinks how he will restore the string of fish-ponds in the bottom of the wooded valley just below, now a rushy meadow with swampy hollows that once were ponds, and humpy mounds, ruins of the ancient dikes; of how the trees will stand reflected in the still water; and how he will live to see again in middle hours of summer days, as did the monks of old, the broad backs of the golden carp basking just below the surface of the sun-warmed water.

And such a man as this comes home some day and finds the narrow-minded gardener, who believes that he already knows all that can be known about gardening, who thinks that the merely technical part, which he perfectly understands, is all that there is to be known and practised, and that his crude ideas about arrangement of flowers are as good as those of any one else. And a man of this temperament cannot be induced to believe, and still less can he be made to understand, that all that he knows is only the means to a further and higher end, and that what he can show of a completed garden can only reach to an average dead-level of dulness compared with what may come of the life-giving influence of one who has the mastery of the higher garden knowledge.

Moreover, he either forgets, or does not know, what is the main purpose of a garden, namely, that it is to give its owner the best and highest kind of earthly pleasure. Neither is he enlightened enough to understand that the master can take a real and intelligent interest in planning and arranging, and in watching the working out in detail. His small-minded vanity can only see in all this a distrust in his own powers and an intentional slight cast on his ability, whereas no such idea had ever entered the master's mind.

Though there are many of this kind of gardener (and with their employers, if they have the patience to retain them in their service, I sincerely condole), there are happily many of a widely-different nature, whose minds are both supple and elastic and intelligently receptive, who are eager to learn and to try what has not yet come within the range of their experience, who show a cheerful readiness to receive a fresh range of ideas, and a willing alacrity in doing their best to work them out. Such a servant as this warms his master's heart, and it would do him good to hear, as I have many times heard, the terms in which the master speaks of him. For just as the educated man feels contempt for the vulgar pretension that goes with any exhibition of ignorant vanity, so the evidence of the higher qualities commands his respect and warm appreciation. Among the gardeners I have known, five such men come vividly to my recollection--good men all, with a true love of flowers, and its reflection of happiness written on their kindly faces.

But then, on the other hand, frequent causes of irritation arise between master and man from the master's ignorance and unreasonable demands. For much as the love of gardening has grown of late, there are many owners who have no knowledge of it whatever. I have more than once had visitors who complained of their gardeners, as I thought quite unreasonably, on their own showing. For it is not enough to secure the services of a thoroughly able man, and to pay good wages, and to provide every sort of appliance, if there is no reasonable knowledge of what it is right and just to expect. I have known a lady, after paying a round of visits in great houses, complain of her gardener. She had seen at one place remarkably fine forced strawberries, at another some phenomenal frame Violets, and at a third immense Malmaison Carnations; whereas her own gardener did not excel in any of these, though she admitted that he was admirable for Grapes and Chrysanthemums. "If the others could do all these things to perfection," she argued, "why could not he do them?" She expected her gardener to do equally well all that she had seen best done in the other big places. It was in vain that I pleaded in defence of her man that all gardeners were human creatures, and that it was in the nature of such creatures to have individual apt.i.tudes and special preferences, and that it was to be expected that each man should excel in one thing, or one thing at a time, and so on; but it was of no use, and she would not accept any excuse or explanation.

I remember another example of a visitor who had a rather large place, and a gardener who had as good a knowledge of hardy plants as one could expect. My visitor had lately got the idea that he liked hardy flowers, though he had scarcely thrown off the influence of some earlier heresy which taught that they were more or less contemptible--the sort of thing for cottage gardens; still, as they were now in fas.h.i.+on, he thought he had better have them. We were pa.s.sing along my flower-border, just then in one of its best moods of summer beauty, and when its main occupants, three years planted, had come to their full strength, when, speaking of a large flower-border he had lately had made, he said, "I told my fellow last autumn to get anything he liked, and yet it is perfectly wretched.

It is not as if I wanted anything out of the way; I only want a lot of common things like that," waving a hand airily at my precious border, while scarcely taking the trouble to look at it.

And I have had another visitor of about the same degree of appreciative insight, who, contemplating some cherished garden picture, the consummation of some long-hoped-for wish, the crowning joy of years of labour, said, "Now look at that; it is just right, and yet it is quite simple--there is absolutely nothing in it; now, why can't my man give me that?"

I am far from wis.h.i.+ng to disparage or undervalue the services of the honest gardener, but I think that on this point there ought to be the clearest understanding; that the master must not expect from the gardener accomplishments that he has no means of acquiring, and that the gardener must not a.s.sume that his knowledge covers all that can come within the scope of the widest and best practice of his craft. There are branches of education entirely out of his reach that can be brought to bear upon garden planning and arrangement down to the very least detail.

What the educated employer who has studied the higher forms of gardening can do or criticise, he cannot be expected to do or understand; it is in itself almost the work of a lifetime, and only attainable, like success in any other fine art, by persons of, firstly, special temperament and apt.i.tude; and, secondly, by their unwearied study and closest application.

But the result of knowledge so gained shows itself throughout the garden. It may be in so simple a thing as the placing of a group of plants. They can be so placed by the hand that knows, that the group is in perfect drawing in relation to what is near; while by the ordinary gardener they would be so planted that they look absurd, or unmeaning, or in some way awkward and unsightly. It is not enough to cultivate plants well; they must also be used well. The servant may set up the canvas and grind the colours, and even set the palette, but the master alone can paint the picture. It is just the careful and thoughtful exercise of the higher qualities that makes a garden interesting, and their absence that leaves it blank, and dull, and lifeless. I am heartily in sympathy with the feeling described in these words in a friend's letter, "I think there are few things so interesting as to see in what way a person, whose perceptions you think fine and worthy of study, will give them expression in a garden."

THE END