The English Flower Garden

A further modification in the round beds has been introduced still more recently. It is the bedding-out of zonal pelargoniums, of echeverias, and of other plants, whose beauty lies in the foliage rather than the blossom. No doubt they give softer tints to the general effect, but they are a poor substitute for the varied beauty of an old garden. It may be difficult to find interest in the ordinary “bedding-out stuff,” but they are poetry itself compared to plants which chiefly remind one of the last days of the garden of “the Sensitive Plant,” when, instead of all odorous flowers, there were only growths

“Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a speckLike the water-snake’s belly and the toad’s back.”

And this latest fancy is itself falling into the further degradation of carpet-bedding. That a carpet should imitate a flower-bed is one thing; years ago in Casa Guidi Windows, Mrs. Browning wrote of some carpets, where

“your footDips deep in velvet roses.”

This may be well enough; but who wants flower-beds to look like carpets? They may strike you at first as being ingenious, and even pretty, but the feeling is at once followed by a sense of their essential debasement as regards gardening. No flower is permitted, and the glorification of stonecrops and houseleeks is the chief result. But indeed the geometrical figures of the carpet-bedding are not the worst. The gardeners are now trying their skill in designs on their carpet-beds, and names, mottoes, coats of arms, and other frivolities, are becoming common. The most stupid follies of the Topiarian age were graceful and sensible compared to this. It is less childish to trim a yew-tree into a peacock than to arrange your sedums and alternantheras to look like animals on a badly-woven carpet. Nor has the absurdity even the merit of being original. It is really an old French invention, and about the time of Henry IV. the gardens at Fontainebleau and Chantilly were known for their quaint devices in flowers, their ships, armorial bearings, and cyphers interlaced. The whole matter has been well summed up by Sir Joseph Hooker, who writes:

“It is indeed astonishing that the asters, helianthus, rudbeckias, silphiums, and numberless other fine North American plants, all so easily grown and so handsome, should be entirely neglected in English gardens, and this in favour of carpets, hearthrugs, and ribbons, forming patterns of violent colours, which, though admired for being the fashion on the lawn and borders of our gardens and grounds, would not be tolerated on the floor of a drawing-room or boudoir.”4

Well, as we can do nothing worse in this direction, we may at last hope for a reaction, in which a new school, with some regard to nature, but without the extravagance of the old “picturesque” gardeners, may bring us back to good taste and common sense.

It is of course absolutely impossible to form even an estimate of the number of bedding-out plants used in our gardens during a single season, to be discarded when the season ends. It must be something enormous. One single florist in the neighbourhood of London sends to market annually more than 80,000 plants of one description of pelargonium alone. It is calculated that the bedding-out of a single good-sized garden will take at least 100,000 plants to make it effective.

But now, leaving the question of summer bedding-out, we are glad to note signs of real advance in other directions. It is something that within the last ten or fifteen years our gardeners should have discovered that bare earth, all spring, is not particularly beautiful, and should have taken to what is called Spring gardening. All flowers are welcome in spring, and even masses of double daisies are acceptable. But indeed in all the most elaborate bedding-out of summer, there is nothing that can give greater pleasure for colouring than a blue lake of Myosotis dissitiflora, or of autumn-sown Nemophila insignis. Then again, owing to our more rapid and easy intercourse with Holland and Belgium, tulips and hyacinths, which, however, were always in favour, are more used than they were some years ago. The quantities sent over by the gardeners of the Low Countries must be very great. Not only do the choicer bulbs go to our own nurserymen, but they are now sent direct to many private gardens; while large auction sales in London, Liverpool, and elsewhere, clear off the inferior roots or those exported by the less well-known growers. Mr. Burbidge tells us that the value of the flower-roots sent from Holland a year or two ago was nearly 60,000l., and one English grower imports annually 160,000 tulip bulbs. A certain proportion of these will be required for forcing purposes for the house and the conservatory, but many more will be used in the open garden. A bed of well-grown tulips is certainly a very beautiful object, and there are some at least who believe in the rich fragrance of the tulip, which a living poet says “might be the very perfume of the sun.”

Besides the spring garden, there is in some places the Semi-tropical garden, and in others the Alpine garden. No one has done more than has Mr. W. Robinson5 to call up an interest in the broad-foliaged plants which are the chief ornament in the gardens of Paris, and in the delicate tufts of flowers which nestle in the crevices of our rockeries. But there is much still to be done. It is, after all, only occasionally that either Semi-tropical or Alpine gardening is to be seen in any perfection. For the former, Battersea and Victoria Parks are extremely good, and for the latter the Messrs. Backhouse’s nursery, near York, has a deserved reputation. Many very handsome semi-tropical plants are all but hardy, and require at most only a protection during the winter months. The canna was known to Gerard and to Cowley, and needs no more care than a dahlia. The Pampas grass and Arundo conspicua are perfectly hardy. The Arundinaria falcata is rather more tender, but unless it flowers, when, like the American aloe, it will die, it will generally spring up from the root, even when its long canes themselves are cut by the frost. The aralia, ricinus, and others, are no doubt safer for being housed during the winter, and then plunged, either as centres for flower-beds, or as separate shrubs in the outside garden. Nothing gives greater character to any garden than the occasional introduction of plants like these. They are now indeed all the more needed since the old plan of having orangeries has so nearly disappeared. And yet how well worth the trouble – the very little trouble – that it cost, the orangery always was. Nothing could be more stately than a broad walk, along the sides of which were ranged the orange-trees, each in its huge tub, and each fruit-bearing and flowering together. And with the orange-trees would be the white-blossoming myrtles and the Clethra arborea, with its scented sprays, like lily-of-the-valley.

As regards the Alpine garden, the first thing to be remembered is, that the rockwork on which it is to be formed should look as natural as possible. Nothing can be more hideous than the usual varieties of suburban rockeries, where the intention seems to be to make everything as unnatural and distorted as can well be imagined How well one knows the jagged fragments of red sandstone standing on end, or the blocks of various formations heaped up together, with bits of green glass, coarse coral, and big shells stuck in at different corners, and with cement between to keep all in place.6 The rocks used should, if possible, be the rocks of the country; they should appear to crop up from the soil; and they should be so laid that plants should really be able to grow in their fissures and interstices. Scarcely less important is the choice of a site, for if the rock-garden is placed under the drip of trees it is hopeless to expect that any of the more delicate and beautiful Alpine plants can thrive. Most ferns, on the other hand, will of course do better in moist, shady places; so that it is impossible successfully to combine the Alpine garden and the fernery, as is very often attempted. Let the Alpine plants have sun and light, and give the ferns the cool shade in which they are most at home. Aquilegias and a few other woodland flowers may be planted in among the osmunda, the hart’s-tongue, and other hardy ferns; and rare mosses and lichens may be taught to cling to the darker clefts and hollows of the rock, as in one rockery which I know, where the “shining moss” (Schistostega pennata) catches and refracts the sunlight with a metallic lustre like that of the humming-bird’s breast.

One of the greatest ornaments to a garden is a fountain, but many fountains are curiously ineffective. A fountain is most beautiful when it leaps high into the air, and you can see it against a background of green foliage. To place a fountain among low flower-beds, and then to substitute small fancy jets, that take the shape of a cup, or trickle over into a basin of gold-fish, or toy with a gilded ball, is to do all that is possible to degrade it. The real charm of a fountain is, when you come upon it in some little grassy glade of the “pleasaunce,” where it seems as though it sought, in the strong rush of its waters, to vie with the tall boles of the forest-trees that surround it. Such was the fountain in Leigh Hunt’s Story of Rimini, which shot up “beneath a shade of darksome pines,”

“And ’twixt their shafts you saw the water bright,Which through the tops glimmered with show’ring light.”

Bacon speaks of a “heath or desert” as a part of the garden, and says it is “to be framed as much as may be to a natural wilderness.” There are to be no trees there, but thickets of honeysuckle and other trailing plants, and heaps like molehills, set with pinks or periwinkles, or violets, or various “sweet and sightly” flowers, and on some of the heaps little bushes of juniper or rosemary, or other low-growing shrubs, are to be planted. Such a garden would hardly seem to be one of “natural wildness”; but Bacon’s theory that there should be a “wild garden” is, with certain modifications, carried out in various places. But to cultivate a wild garden almost involves a paradox. The plants should grow of their own accord, and as their vagrant fancy takes them. The prettiest of all wild gardens is when the bluebells are so thick that they seem a reflection of the sky, or the celandine lies in sunny patches on a bank, or the primrose and violet come up here and there at the foot of old forest-trees. Sometimes, too, less common flowers, which have been planted years ago, and have spread as it has pleased them, give an effect of even greater beauty. We remember one large shrubbery all blue with hepaticas, and another golden with the winter aconite. Other plants, such as the anchusa or the Petasites fragrans, may be trusted to take care of themselves, and are well worth some half-wild corner. On the other hand, it is not well to attempt to grow native plants when the conditions of their new life would be unfavourable. It is almost sad to see some bee-orchis, or grass of Parnassus, or mountain auricula, or other rare British plant, transplanted into a shrubbery border. It is far better to leave these “wildings of nature,” as Campbell calls them, in their native haunts, and to experience for oneself a new pleasure in finding them growing wild and vigorous on down, or bog, or hilly slope. Occasionally a garden flower which has sprung up from some stray seed will add a certain unexpected charm to a walk or grass plot. Such flowers are in a sense weeds no doubt, but “weeds of glorious feature,” and there are few who, like Lady Byron – and the story is characteristic – would at once order the gardener to uproot them. One beautiful form of semi-wild garden is where, on some piece of rich peat soil, rhododendrons have been thickly planted. There is a fine example of this at Knowsley, where thousands of large shrubs are growing in the greatest luxuriance, and where, as the slight irregularity of the ground permits, you pass between banks and slopes and hollows, quite purple with the clustered blossoms.

It is of course impossible to lay down any code of rules which would be equally applicable to every garden. As I have already said, there will always be a certain amount of bedding-out necessary, especially for the architectural gardens that surround a stately house; but we may hope that in all bedding-out more attention will be given than at present to the proper harmony of colours. It really would sometimes appear that half our English gardeners must be colour-blind. The gaudiest and most glaring contrasts pain instead of gratifying the eye, with their crude patches of pink and red and blue and yellow. In France the bedded-out borders have more generally a variety of plants mixed on the same bed, and this certainly tends to soften the general effect.

But both in the outside lawns and shrubberies, and in the walled inner garden, there is much room for improvement. A great principle in laying out the lawns is the old principle of Batty Langley’s (a principle which he himself parodied rather than illustrated) of so arranging your grounds that everything cannot be seen at once, and that each turn of the walks excites some fresh interest. The curved lines of a shrubbery, now approaching and now receding, the grass running up into little bays and recesses among deodaras and groups of rhododendrons, specimen trees occasionally breaking a formal line, but never dotted about at regular intervals, – these are the features that lend attraction to a lawn. We would allow of no flower-bed whatever except the shrubbery border, though an occasional clump of tritomas, of cannas, or of Pampas grass, may take the place of flowering shrubs, and start up from corners of the grass. Their height and general aspect enables them to form part of the picture. But – one cannot repeat it too often – the expanse of the lawn should be rarely broken except by shrubberies; and that the lawn itself should be carefully kept and free from weeds is of course essential.

One of the most beautiful gardens I ever knew depended almost entirely on the arrangement of its lawns and shrubberies. It had certainly been most carefully and adroitly planned, and it had every advantage in the soft climate of the west of England. The various lawns were divided by thick shrubberies, so that you wandered on from one to the other, and always came on something new. In front of these shrubberies was a large margin of flower border, gay with the most effective plants and annuals. At one corner of the lawn a standard Magnolia grandiflora of great size held up its chaliced blossoms; at another a tulip-tree was laden with hundreds of yellow flowers. Here a magnificent Salisburia mocked the foliage of the maiden-hair; and here an old cedar swept the grass with its huge pendent branches. But the main breadth of each lawn was never destroyed, and past them you might see the reaches of a river, now in one aspect, and now in another. Each view was different, and each was a fresh enjoyment and surprise.

A few years ago, and I revisited the place; the “improver” had been at work, and had been good enough to open up the view. Shrubberies had disappeared, and lawns had been thrown together. The pretty peeps among the trees were gone, the long vistas had become open spaces, and you saw at a glance all that there was to be seen. Of course the herbaceous borders, which once contained numberless rare and interesting plants, had disappeared, and the lawn in front of the house was cut up into little beds of red pelargoniums, yellow calceolarias, and the rest.

But we have now to speak of the shrubbery. It will depend on its situation whether or not it is backed by forest-trees, but in any case it will have a certain number of evergreens in front. To plant evergreens alone is generally a mistake. Horace Walpole says that he was “not fond of total plantations of evergreens,” and he was certainly right. Shrubberies composed entirely of holly, yew, and pinus must inevitably have a solid, heavy appearance, and their use in winter barely compensates for their melancholy monotony during the summer months. They should, wherever it is possible, have deciduous flowering shrubs planted in among them. Nothing can be prettier than to see the dark shades of the evergreens lighted up by the fresh tender green of lilac or laburnum, while, later in the season, the background of evergreen will in its turn give effect to the purple plumes and golden tresses. But there is great art in the laying out of shrubberies and the arrangement of the shrubs. There is the time of flowering to be considered, and no less the various colours of the blossoms, while (very occasionally it is true) the tints of the leaves, as they first expand, or are touched by the chills of autumn, and even the prevailing tone of bark and branches, are studied, so that there may be always some happy effect of colouring. But for the most part all this is neglected. There are very few gardeners who pay the attention they should to the shrubbery, and still fewer owners of gardens who care to interfere in the matter. A pinetum has of late years become something of a fashion, and is therefore often a subject of interest, but the shrubbery and the shrubbery border are scarcely regarded. Lilacs and laburnums, scarlet thorns, and rhododendrons are very beautiful; but to confine our flowering shrubs to these implies either want of knowledge or want of taste. There are numbers besides, perfectly hardy, or only requiring some slight protection in the winter, which are comparatively but little known. Even many old favourites have been allowed to become unfamiliar. The white and yellow broom, the Ghent azaleas (excepting perhaps the yellow one), the barberry with its bunches of golden blossom and coral fruit, the Buddleia with its glaucous leaves and honeyed balls like tiny oranges, the Gueldres rose covered with its large white tufts of snow, the scarlet ribes with its brisk scent of black currant, are not to be seen as often as they once were. The Judas-tree (Cercis), whose little clusters of pink pea-blossom come out so early in the year, and the bladder-senna, whose curious paper-like bags of seed, hanging late on in autumn, burst as you press them with a sharp report, are still more rarely to be found. Of later introductions the Weigelia alone seems to hold its own, but the Desfontainea spinosa, looking like a holly, but throwing out scarlet and yellow tubes of blossom, or the diplopappus, with its leaves like a variegated thyme, and its flowers like a minute aster, are hardly ever seen. But there are many more as good as these.

For covering a house the large magnolia is perhaps more beautiful than anything. The perfume of its white flowers, though too strong for the house, fills the air for yards round, and comes in stray whiffs through the open window. This magnolia will flourish abundantly in most places, and if it does not, it is probably owing to its roots requiring to be cabined, cribbed, and confined. Other good shrubs for the outside of the house are the ceanothus, the escallonia, and the cydonia or Pyrus japonica, and these two last are well worth growing as independent shrubs. The Pyrus japonica, moreover, when trained as a hedge, and breaking out all along its twisted stems into knots of cherry-coloured blossom, is extremely beautiful.

And in the more favoured nooks of England greenhouse shrubs, such as camellias and cytisus, may be seen to flourish and flower abundantly in the open air. There is a striking example of this as far north as the Anglesea side of the Menai Straits. Thirty years ago Sir John Hay Williams determined to build a house and form a garden on a steep field sloping down to the water’s edge. The excessive steepness of the ground made it necessary to construct a number of supporting walls to form terraces; and the entire plan was carried out by the owner without any professional assistance. Huge fuchsias, myrtles, the Fabiana imbricata, and other beautiful flowering shrubs grow up against the house, and, sheltered by a terrace-wall, are magnificent camellias and cytisus. I once saw this garden of Rhianva under rather remarkable circumstances. It was the Sunday (March 24, 1878) when the ill-fated Eurydice went down. The snow-storm came on, and the snow-flakes fell heavily on the red and white camellias, which were then in great perfection. An hour later, and the sun was again shining, the snow was melting away, and the blossoms appeared from beneath it as fresh as if nothing had occurred.

In front of the shrubbery border should be placed strong-growing hardy plants, which, once planted, will give no further trouble. The monks-hood, with its quaint indigo blossoms, the large evening primrose, whose yellow stars come out each night all through the summer,7 the foxglove, which will sometimes grow eight feet high and bear from two to three hundred flowers upon a single stem, herbaceous phloxes of every variety of red and purple hue, pæonies and irises, and for late autumn the old Michaelmas daisy, are among the most suitable plants for this purpose.

Passing into the walled garden, we shall probably find the northern side taken up with vineries and plant-houses, with which, however, we have nothing to do, except in so far as they supply us with any tender or half-hardy plants for our garden-beds. In front of these houses will be great borders of stocks and mignonette, scenting the air – the mignonette sweetest when the sun is strongest, and the stocks as evening falls. Broad walks and thick hedges of yew, or privet, or the tree-box, divide the flower from the kitchen garden; and where the walks intersect, there may perhaps be an old-fashioned pond with aquatic plants or a fountain; and here let me say that the rarer aquatic plants might be much more grown than they are at present, and of all none is more charming than the Aponogeton distachyon, with its little scent-laden boats of blossom. Every available garden wall will be covered with fruit-trees, beautiful in spring time with the pink flowers of peach and nectarine, or the white bloom of pear and cherry. Near the vineries will probably be the flower garden, divided into small beds by narrow gravel walks, and with long strips of garden stretching down along the side of the vegetables or gooseberry bushes, so that even here there will be something of fragrance and of beauty. Even the kitchen-garden itself may be so arranged as to keep the more homely kail-yard out of sight. The graceful plumes of asparagus, the broad grey leaves of the globe artichoke, the trailing luxuriance of the gourd, and above all the festoons of scarlet runners (especially when trained along strings fastened to a centre pole so as to form cones or tents) are anything but unsightly; then a corner should be found for a small herb-garden, with little patches of sage and marjoram, and thyme and mint and fennel. There should be rosemary too, and tansy for Easter Sunday, and borage to supply a blue flowering sprig for claret-cup.

When we come to the flower-beds themselves, we have an almost infinite variety of flowers from which to choose for their adornment. In old days, when the tulips were over, there were beds of anemones and ranunculus – and a bed of ranunculus when the sun shines full upon the scarlet petals is a glorious sight. Then came annuals and herbaceous plants. Now, as each year brings something new, and the old plants, if out of fashion, can yet generally be procured, our difficulty is the difficulty of selection.

We have already quoted Harrison’s description of his Elizabethan garden, but it is of course in the old English Herbals that we find the fullest account of what was grown, whether for beauty or for use. The most famous of these are the Grete Herbal, by Peter Treveris, published in 1516, and Turner’s Herbal, with the date of 1568; but better known than either are Gerard’s Herbal, of which the first edition appeared in 1597, and Parkinson’s Paradisus Terrestris, published in 1629, and dedicated to Henrietta Maria. An early chapter in Parkinson is taken up with the various edgings for “knots and trayles,” and he says, “the one are living herbes, and the others are dead materials, as leade, boords, bones, tyles, &c.” Among “living herbes” he mentions thrift as having been “most anciently received,” lavender, cotton, and slips of juniper or yew; but on the whole he recommends “French or Dutch boxe.” His flowers, he divides into English and “outlandish” flowers, and his list is extensive enough for a good garden of to-day. “Of daffodils,” he writes, “there are almost a hundred sorts;” and his list of “tulipas,” as he calls them, extends over several pages, and is at least as full as a modern nurseryman’s catalogue.