Part 20

As I said just now, wild gardening, by which I mean the garden use of wild flowers, is to be confessed a failure unless you can induce the flowers to seed themselves. Once you can do that, you may talk about your wild garden. Once I saw a corner of a man’s garden, where there was a waterfall, and _ramondia_ growing as it does in the Pyrenees. That was a memorable sight. I have had my own moderate successes of the sort. Anemone _blanda_ has become as common as groundsel; but _apennina_ refuses to seed. The Widow iris, _tuberosa_, which started in life in a dry ditch under Vesuvius, and came to South Wilts in a sponge bag, is another weed. I left a garden with more of that growing in it than anybody can want. Fritillary is not a native, but seeds freely in my water meadow; colchicum, another alien, increases like coltsfoot. Both the cyclamens, the Neapolitan and the Greek, have large families, which can never be too large--and so on. Such are some of my little triumphs, of which I dare not boast lest I be rebuked as once I was by a high lady in garden society. It was not kind of her, though no doubt she did it for my good. It was a time when I was growing cushion irises, with enormous pains and exiguous results. However, one fine Spring I did induce _Iris iberica_ to utter its extraordinary flowers--six of it, to be exact. Of that feat, meeting her at a party, I vaunted to the high lady. I can still see the glimmering of her eyelids, hear her dry voice commenting, “_I_ had four hundred.” It may have been good for me, but was it good for her? If I had known then, as I knew afterwards, that she had flowered her four hundred at Aix-les-Bains, I think I might have rebuked her--so far as high ladies can be rebuked--by telling her that she could have had four thousand on such terms. But I knew nothing of it. There she had me.

I would not now give twopence for _Iris iberica_ unless it would increase in my plot. I have come to make that the staple of good gardening, and would set no bounds to feats of the kind. Certainly, I am not with the purists who say--or said--that it is inartistic to grow foreign things in wild spaces. The Reverend William Mason, in the eighteenth century, who turned Capability Brown into poetry, was plainly of that opinion. It may be inartistic, but it is very jolly. I am experimenting just now with some of the plants and shrubs from Tibet which poor Farrer gave us before he died. I find that most of them grow like Jack’s beanstalk, but care very little about flowering. I have a briar-rose, a grey-leafed, bushy, spiky thing rather like _Rosa Willmottia_, which gives me canes tree-high, but so far no flowers. Farrer’s behymned _Viburnun fragrans_ grows apace: its fragrance has yet to be tested. He said that it was like heliotrope, and I hope that it may prove so. Then I have a Spiraea from Tibet, which came to me from Wisley in a thumb-pot, marked “Rosa-species,” but is unmitigated Spiraea. You may practically see the thing grow if, like it, you have nothing else to do. It is now as big as a bamboo-clump, and impervious to frost. So far as it is concerned, this might be the valley of Avilion. Once only has the vast affair considered flowering. Two years ago buds showed themselves at the end of August and, with a leisureliness for which the stock had not prepared me, were ready to expand by the middle of October. They then looked as much like bunches of bananas as anything else, and if all had gone well, would no doubt have been the talk of the county. But, as you might suppose, by the time they were ready,

“Swift summer into the autumn flowed, And frost in the mist of the morning rode;”

and the Spiraea, deeply offended, did nothing at all except slowly rot, and, to pursue _The Sensitive Plant_,

“Fill the place with a monstrous undergrowth,”

as was only to be expected. Since that check to its ardour, it has devoted itself to root-action and the results; and all I can do is to admire its rapidly maturing timber, and consider whether it or the house should be removed.

Lucky accidents, or happy experiments, will acclimatise difficult things sometimes. I don’t know how often or in how many places I had tried to make the Alpine gentian, _verna_, feel at home, when I happened to meet a soldier somewhere who lived in Ireland. He told me of his own efforts with it in artfully prepared moraines and joy-heaps of the kind. It lived, and it flowered, as it has lived and flowered, and also died, here--but it did not spread. It existed, not throve. Then, perhaps by inspiration, he put some of it into a gravel path, and left it there. Or perhaps it drifted there by itself, as such things will--I don’t remember how it was. There, at any rate, it increased and multiplied and replenished the earth, growing indeed as you may see it in Swiss pastures in early Spring, deep blue stars afloat in the streaming waters--one of earth’s loveliest sights. Ah, what an “event” for a gardener to nail that miracle every year as it comes round. I would wait for that as I do for the cuckoo. But first I must wait for a gravel path.

DAFFODILS

I don’t suppose that any flower in England, except the rose, has been more bepraised, as somebodys aid, by poets who were not gardeners, and gardeners who were not poets; and it is certainly difficult in dealing with it to leave Wordsworth out. I shan’t be able to do it, because I shall want him, but I shall do my best to reach the end of this article without quoting from _A Winter’s Tale_. It is satisfactory, at least, to be certified, as I am from Parkinson, that all of our poets, from Shakespeare to Mr. Masefield, have been exercised about the same plant. Parkinson says that we had two English daffodils, one which he calls Peerless Primrose, and another which can be identified as the double daffodil, and which, he says, Gerard found in an old woman’s cottage garden--just where we find it now. Neither Parkinson nor, I suspect, any of the poets had a notion that, strictly speaking, the daffodil was the Asphodel; but how it came about that the word changed its designation I am not able to say. Branching asphodel grows wild in Ireland--not, I believe, in England--and classical poetry is, of course, full of it, though it puts the stiff and stately thing to strange uses. Poets who, as it was freely declared, reclined upon beds of asphodel and moly had not found out the best sites in the Elysian Fields. No flower, however, more eloquently reports the South. I never see mine, whose seed I collected on the Acropolis at Athens, but I remember the Pont du Gard, and the sharp smell of the box-bushes, or Greece, where it clouds the slopes of Hymettus with pink, and burns brown against the sky as you labour up the winding path to Acrocorinth. It will do in England, and do well, if you can secure it sun and drouth.

Our own name for the wild daffodil is Lent Lily, a beautiful and sufficient one, and, to judge by the poets again, the plant has been well distributed. Shakespeare saw it in Warwickshire, and Herrick in Devon; Clare in Northamptonshire, and Wordsworth in the Lakes. Mr. Housman knows it in Salop, and Mr. Masefield in Worcestershire. I know that it is in Sussex and Cornwall, and on the edges of the New Forest. It may be in North Wilts, almost certainly is in the upper Thames Valley; but it is not here, to the best of my belief. I imagine that it does not care for chalk, for though I make it do, it does not thrive, that is, spread itself. Rather, it degenerates, as it used in Kent, where I lived as a boy, and in two or three years turned itself into the old “greenery-yallery” mophead which, whatever Parkinson may say, is not a true variety at all but a bad kind of recidivist. Now, my expert friend, Mr. George Engleheart, who lives across the hills, but on loam, grows daffodils which are a wonder of the realm; but the point is that his discards, which he throws into ditches or stuffs into holes to take their chance, never degenerate into doubles. His ground is a soapy yellow loam, on which you can grow any mortal thing; and a visit to his daffodil fields, as it were just now, is an experience which I have had and promise myself again. All the same, honesty moves me to say--_miror magis!_ He, of course, is a scientist who has grown grey in the pursuit, and I am a sciolist. The beautiful things whose minute differences of hue and measurement are of such moment to him; the nicety of the changes which you can ring upon perianth and calyx--such modulations do not, in my judgment, give the thrill or sudden glory which flowers growing freely and in masses give me: such a thrill as you get from Poet’s Narcissus in a Swiss pasture, or such as Wordsworth’s sister, and then Wordsworth, had from the wind-caught drift of daffodils in Gowbarrow Park; or such as I had in an orchard in North Cornwall, where, as it seemed, under a canopy of snow and rose some god at a picnic had spilled curds and whey all over the sward. The flowers were so thick together as to be distinguishable only as colour: they streamed in long rivers of yellow and white down the hill. My description is less poetical than literal. The things looked eatable, they were so rich.

If you can get such a thrill on your own ground it is by the grace of God. Mr. Engleheart does not grow bulbs for the thrills of the unscientific, though no doubt he has some of his own. But there is one glory of the unskilled and another of the skilled--indeed, the latter has two, for as well as the pure delight of having “pulled off” a delicate bit of cross-breeding, there is added the hope of gain. Your new daffodil should be a gold-mine, and rightly so, because it may represent the work, the thought, and the anxieties of seven years or even more. I heard of a grower once who, at the season of distribution, had his bulbs out upon his studio table, where they were being sorted, priced and bestowed. In one heap he had certain triumphs of science which were worth, I was told, £90 the bulb. From that point of bliss you could run down through the pounds to the shillings and bring up finally upon the articles which went out at ten shillings a hundred, or even less. There then they lay out, “so many and so many and such glee.” And then, O then--“a whirl blast,” as Wordsworth says, “from behind the hill” swept in at the open door, lifted all the sheets of paper and their freight together, and scattered the priced bulbs higgledy-piggledy on the floor. There was tragic work! Bang went all your ninety pounders; for a bulb in the hand may be worth a thousand on the floor.

One of those unaccountable facts in entomology which are always cropping up in gardening has much exercised my learned friend. Although he has never imported a bulb, nevertheless into his bulb-farm there has imported itself the daffodil parasite--out of the blue, or the black. He showed it me one day, a winged beast somewhere in appearance between a wasp and a hoverfly. I saw bars upon its body, and short wings which looked as if they were made of talc. This creature has a _lues_ for laying its eggs in the daffodil bulb, and to do so pierces it through and through. Last of all the bulb dies also. There seems to be no remedy but pursuit, capture and death. Just so have the figs at Tarring called up the _beccafico_ from Italy. Can these things be, without our special wonder?

To grow and bring to flower every daffodil you put in the ground is not what I call gardening. Reasonable treatment will ensure it, for the flower is in the bulb before you plant it. As well might you buy from the florist things in full bud, plunge them into your plots, and call _that_ gardening. Yet it is the gardening of the London parks, and of certain grandees, who ought to know better. If you are graced by nature or art to make daffodils feel themselves at home, you are in the good way. Wisley is so graced; not, I think, Kew. At Wisley they have acclimatised those two charming narcissi, _bulbocodium_ and _cyclamineus_, which really carpet the ground. When I was last there they were all over the paths, in the ditches, and in the grass. I daresay they required drastic treatment, for Wisley, after all, was made for man, and not for daffodils. Yet if Wisley were my garden, I know that I should be so flattered by the confidence of those pretty Iberians that I should let them do exactly as they pleased. If a plant chose to make itself a weed, I would as readily allow it as I would a weed which chose to make itself a plant--within reason. I add that qualification, that tyrant’s plea, because I have just remembered what occurred when I was once rash enough to introduce _Mulgedium alpinum_ from Switzerland. There is no shaking off that insatiable succubus. I was reconciled to giving up a garden on its account, and full of hope that I should never see it again. But I brought with me a peony and some phloxes, and _Mulgedium_ was coiled about their vitals like a tapeworm. It is with me to this hour.

The prettiest thing that a narcissus ever did was done to an old lady I used to know who lived in a cottage in Sussex. Somebody had given her half-a-dozen Jonquil bulbs, which she planted and left alone. They took kindly to her and her cottage garden, and seeded all over it. When I came to know her, the little patch of ground, the dividing ditch, the bank beyond it, and some of the arable beyond that were golden with jonquils; and on days of sun-warmed wind you could smell them from afar. As, with trifling exceptions, it is the sweetest and most carrying scent in the garden, that is not surprising. Hawthorn is such another. Somewhere in Hakluyt’s _Voyages_ is an account of the return of an embassy from the Court of Boris Godounov. The sailors knew that they were near Sussex before they could see the white cliffs by the smell of the may wafted over sea. What a welcome home!

WINDFLOWERS

“Anemones, which droop their eyes Earthward before they dare arise To flush the border....”

says the poet, and says truly, for I believe there is no exception to his general statement. The point is really one in the argument between the gardeners and the botanists, as to whether you are to reckon hepaticas as anemones. I shall come to that presently, and here will only point out that hepaticas do _not_ droop their eyes, or hang their heads, as I prefer to say. Let that be remembered when the scientist tries, as he is so fond of doing, to browbeat the mild Arcadian. Except for that remark I don’t call to mind that the poets have sung about the windflowers. None of them has likened his young woman to a windflower. Meleager, indeed, when he is paying a compliment to his Zenophile, pointedly leaves it out.

“Now bloom white violets, now the daffodils That love the rain, now lilies of the hills,”

he begins; and what lilies those could have been, unless they were lilies of the valley (which sounds absurd), I don’t know. But how could he talk about spring flowers in his country and leave anemones out? It is true, he was a Syrian; but politics don’t interest anemones. No one is to tell me that Asia Minor is without _Anemone fulgens_.

Fulgens is the typical Greek anemone, anyhow, as Coronaria always seems to me specifically Italian. It is a wonder of the woodlands--as of those between Olympia and Megalopolis, or of the yet denser brakes about Tatoi, where the late Constantine used to retire and meditate statecraft. Blanda, the starry purple flower of eighteen points, is commoner in the open. Nothing more beautiful than the flush of these things under the light green veil of the early year can be imagined. The gardener in England who can compass anything like it is in a good way. Luckily it is easy, for these are kindly plants, seed freely, flower in their first year, and are not so affected by climate as to change their habits to suit our calendar. Do not grow them in woods if you want them early. Our woods, _in quella parte del giovinetto anno_, are both cold and wet. Put them in the open, in light soil sloping to the south, and you will have as many as you want. One thing I have noticed about them is that in England fulgens is constant to its colour, whereas in Greece there are albinos, pure white and very beautiful, with black stamens. The pairing of those with the staple has produced a pink fulgens of great attractions. I have imported it, but it has not spread, and the seed of it comes up scarlet. Blanda has no sports, and is so proliferous that if it is much grown in soils that suit it very probably it will become a naturalised British subject. Here it is a weed.

Our own pair of windflowers are not nearly so easy to deal with as those two Aegean tourists. Nemorosa will only grow happily in woods, and even there does not readily transplant. Pulsatilla is subject to winter rot, as anything which lies out at nights in a fur coat must expect to be; and it reacts immediately and adversely to a rich soil. Now nemorosa grows in the fields in Germany, even in water meadows; pulsatilla in Switzerland will stand any amount of snow. But the snow in Switzerland is as dry as salt, and no flower objects to a flood when it is beginning to grow. The enemy in England is wet at the slack time. The best way to treat pulsatilla is to grow it on a steep slope, for that is how it grows itself.

Talking of nemorosa, there is a harebell blue variety of it which I have seen, but never had, and of course the yellow ranunculoides, to be met with in Switzerland, though it is not a widespread plant. I found a broad patch of it under some trees on the edge of Lake Lugano: a clear buttercup yellow, not a dirty white. I don’t call it an exciting plant, all the same, and am perfectly happy without it, and to know it the only truly yellow anemone that exists.

No offence, I hope, to the great sulphur anemone of the Alps, a noble windflower indeed. I know few things more exhilarating than to round a bluff and find a host of it in stately dance. And I know few things less so than to try to dig it up. I have devoted some hours to the pursuit, notably after a night spent at Simplon Dorf. I rose early and toiled till breakfast. I had an inefficient trowel, bought in Florence, and an alpenstock, and with them excavated some two feet of Simplon. At that depth the root of the sulphur anemone was of the thickness of a reasonable rattlesnake, and ran like the _coda_ of a sonata, strongly, and apparently for ever. Something had to give, and it was the anemone. I coiled up what I had, brought it back with me in a knapsack, and made a home for it among my poor rocks. Nothing to speak of happened for two years, except that it let me know that it lived. Then came a Spring and a miracle. The sulphur anemone burgeoned: that is the only word for what it did. Since then it has never failed, though more than once the rocks have been rent asunder. In what goes on underground this anemone is a tree.

I do not forget--am not likely to forget--Coronaria, which in its (I must own) somewhat sophisticated form of _Anemone de Caen_ is the glory of my blood and state in the little hanging garden I now possess. I own, it seems, the exact spot it likes. It is thoroughly at home, and proves it by flowering practically all the year round. In the dog-days, I don’t say. But who cares what happens in August? Except for that waste month--the only one in the almanac with nothing distinctive to report--I believe I have hardly failed of a handful of coronaria. Since Christmas I have not failed of a bowlful, and at this time of writing it is out in a horde. Wonderful things they are: nine inches high, four inches across, with a palette ranging from white through the pinks to red and crimson, through the lilacs to violet and the purple of night. There are few better garden flowers. Untidy? Yes, they need care. Too free with their seed? They cannot be for me. I am open to the flattery of a flower’s confidence as (still) to that of a woman’s. Another thing to its credit is its attraction for bees, with the range of tint and tinge which that involves. Your whites will be flushed with auroral rose, or clouded with violet; you will have flecks and splashes of sudden colour, the basal ring of white, whence comes its cognomen, annulata, sometimes invaded. Even the black centre with its stamens is not constant: I have one with a pale green base and stamens of yellow. With these fine things fulgens goes usefully and happily. Coronaria has no such vermilion. A bank of the two together, growing in the sun, can be seen half a mile away, and won’t look like scarlet geranium if there is a judicious admixture. To qualify that dreadful sophistication called “St. Brigid” I shall serve myself of W. S. Gilbert’s useful locution. “Nobody,” he said, “thinks more highly of So-and-so than I do; and _I_ think he’s a little beast.”

Apennina, I think, wants a mountain. I should like to try it in some favoured ghyll in Cumberland, and some day I will. I have it on a lawn, and have had it for many years. There is no less, but no more, than there ever was. It does not seed. The two colours, china-blue and white, are delicious in partnership, though the blue is not so good as that of blanda, and the white not quite so white as nemorosa’s.