Rhapsody in Green
Page 3
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ONE CANNOT HAVE too many camellias, just as one cannot have too much caviar. (GOTM, 242)
TREES
THE FINEST MIMOSA I ever saw … was so covered with blossom that it looked like an immense gold powder puff. One could stand under it, and gently shake the branches, so that the delicate dust drifted on to one’s head, and one enjoyed all the sensations of a blonde—whatever they may be. (DTGP, 218–219)
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AN IMMENSE DOUBLE white cherry, at that ecstatic moment in its existence when the sun is telling it that it cannot keep so much beauty to itself any longer, that it is high time it let the sad world gaze upon its innocence. (GGTC, 55–56)
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THE SKY WAS very blue and the sunlight danced in and out of the branches of the great willow. There was such a multitude of shifting lights, so many swift sarabands of shadow, that you would say some giant and ghostly hand was poised above it, scattering confetti through the tangled boughs, confetti of gold and silver, that melted into the summer airs. (GGTC, 66–67)
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THE INDIAN BOY is the result of a curious convolution of branches in an old chestnut: there are two perfectly formed legs, a long slim body, a small knotted head, and two branching arms uplifted to the sky…. The only drawback is that in order to [see the boy] you have to be lying in the bath…. But very few other people have seen him…. ‘If you come up and lie down in the bathroom I’ll show you my little Indian boy—’ No. Definitely not. (MH, 242–243)
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THE GROUP OF spindles … were quite breath-taking in their beauty, and a perfect example of the way in which Nature can be vulgar and get away with it—for what could be more garish than a berry with a magenta shell and a bright orange pip? (LOTS, 202)
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THE VERY THOUGHT of the Eucryphia makes my blood-pressure rise, and fills my brain with a buzz of superlatives…. The Eucryphia is summer snow. It is spring blossom in the heavy, sultry months, when the year is middle-aged. At a time when all the trees in the valley are staid and set, and when some of their leaves are already flecked with the sad stains of autumn, the Eucryphia arrive—young and gay and white—like a girl who has come late to party, and the revels begin all over again. (SOTL, 122–123)
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AT THE RISK of sounding faintly morbid, as though one had learned one’s horticulture from the pages of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, I must confess that for me the flower of the magnolia is most beautiful when life has almost ebbed from it. These are the twilit hours when the petals flag and falter, when their immaculate ivory texture dims, when they glow with a ghostly radiance that seems to come from another world. (FFF, 47)
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WHEN I SET out for my daily promenade in Central Park, my path took me past a line of ginkgos … with the mink-clad armies of Park Avenue matrons tugging their poodles past their indestructible trunks. I longed to pluck the sleeve of one of these matron and say to her, ‘Do you realize that you are walking past fifty million years of natural history? Do you realize that if you allowed your poodle to pause at one of those trunks, as he obviously wishes to do, he would be, as it were, sending a personal message, through time and space, to a pterodactyl?’ (GOTM, 86–87)
Chapter 3
ENEMIES WITHIN THE GATES
Nichols rarely met a plant he didn’t like, but when he did his wit was at its wickedest as he skewered the offender with haughty disdain. On the other hand, his writings reveal a soft spot for even the most widely despised weed.
BEGONIAS ARE NOT flowers, they are a state of mind, and a regrettable state into the bargain. (MH, 53)
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DATURA … is a flower that leaves me less than cold. Even in its native habitat in the Mediterranean, where it can grow to its full height and send out a riot of white blossom, it always reminds me of a clump of laurels on which somebody has hung the weekly washing. (MH, 83–84)
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THE ELM HAD been [the former owner’s] favourite tree, and it was he who had planted them, nearly forty years ago. For this alone, he should have been cursed, and so should anybody else who ever plants an elm. They are useless, hulking brutes of trees, and as soon as Constable had finished painting them they should have been rooted out of the British Isles. (MH, 88–89)
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THE DEVIL’S WALKING STICK. If you wonder why it is called that, the best thing to do is to grasp it firmly round the stem. After which you will probably call it something worse. (HDYGG, 27)
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IF I WERE artistic dictator of this country I would make it illegal for any householder, during the next twenty years, to plant another specimen of Prunus ‘Kansan’, popularly known as Hisakura, the gaudy double pink cherry which every spring erupts like an infectious rash down thousands of suburban avenues. This shade of pink should never be planted in isolation, particularly against a background of new red brick. Like some of the pinks in the pictures of Matisse it comes into its own only when it is set against less luscious tints—colours, as it were, with a squeeze of lemon in them, to take away the taste of the sugar. (GOTD, 118)
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IN A SMALL garden, weeping trees—by a curious paradox—are the life and soul of the party. But why must it be a willow, which weeps to such excess? Why not one of the trees whose lachrymosity is less abandoned? (GOTD, 119)
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NOW FOR ORNAMENTAL grasses. These, I hope you will agree, can be sheer hell. A well-grown ‘pampas grass’, sited in the middle of a suburban lawn, with all those ghastly feather dusters sticking out of it, can be as embarrassing as a middle-aged lady standing on the steps of a provincial town hall, disguised as Cleopatra after the annual fancy dress ball at the Rotary Club. (GOTD, 203)
TO WHISPER A word against roses, in England or America, is simply not ‘done’. When one suggests that we can have too many of them and that the role they are able to play in the garden is limited, one’s remarks are received with the same sort of horrified incredulity as if one had observed, en passant, that all dogs were not necessarily the noblest creatures in the animal kingdom nor all babies the most beautiful examples of God’s handiwork. (GOTM, 152–153)
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WHY SHOULD NATURE approve of a hybrid tea? Without its flowers, which means for the greater part of its life, it is gaunt, gawky, and deliberately deformed by man, with its tortured, amputated limbs sticking out in all directions, demanding pity rather than praise. (GOTM, 154)
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A LAWN, WE MUST always remember, is not a natural creation; it is a luxurious artifice, which must be expensively fed and elaborately cosseted. A perfect lawn is a pampered lawn; and pampered lawns, like pampered people, are apt to develop a number of tiresome diseases. (GOTM, 216–217)
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IF I WERE dictator of this country the only permissible explosives would be reserved for the elimination—with very few exceptions—of our public parks. These explosives would be so powerful that they would destroy every trace of the hundreds of thousands of triangular beds of blue lobelias by which we are at present assaulted, bring instant death to a million shocking-pink begonias, and send into merciful coma, for an indefinite period, the armies of municipal officials who are entrusted by the State with the creation of these monstrosities. (GOTM, 192)
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DOCKS ARE THE worst weeds of all, because just as you are pulling them up, they make a sickly, sucking noise, and break in half…. Whereupon you have to tramp off to the tool shed, arm yourself with a trowel, and return to the scene of action, only to find that you have forgotten where the abominable dock-root is lurking…. If you are lucky you will find, after ten minutes’ search, an obscene sprout that you imagine to be the dock root. It is only after you have thrown it into the hedge that you realize, with horror, that you have destroyed your best gentian. (DTGP, 124–125)
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GARDENING GLOVES MAY be all very well in their way, but in so many tasks, like weeding, one has literally to take the gloves off. Only one’s own
nails and fingers can deal, for example, with the sinister little bulbous roots of Oxalis floribunda, and only naked arms plunged in up to the elbows can tackle the slimy, sucking growths that have attached themselves to the sides of the lily pond by the time that autumn comes. (GOTD, 14)
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WHATEVER ITS MEANS of transport the valerian takes root in the crevices [of a wall], sends out its shrill green leaves, and eventually bursts into song in a series of rosy arias round about the first week in July. And the garden will delight in this floral music, and so will its feline neighbours, for whom its aroma has always had a special appeal. And it will go on delighting until one day, with a loud crash, the wall falls down. (GOTM, 139)
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UNLESS YOU ARE ruthless with [Corydalis lutea], your wall will start to crumble and eventually have to be rebuilt. The strength of these weeds, their swiftness and their cunning, is so formidable that … I could not help thinking how useful they would have been in a floral assault on Jericho. Instead of that rather vulgar business with the trumpets the affair could have been concluded far more gracefully with a handful of seeds. (GOTM, 140–141)
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IF WEEDS ARE indeed flowers, and often very beautiful flowers, are we justified in excluding them from the garden scene? Does not the very fact that we do so argue a regrettable lack of imagination? … It forces us to examine our whole sense of aesthetic values; it obliges us to ask whether we still have that ‘innocence of eye’ which is the essential of all artistic perception. (GOTM, 138)
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THE PRETTIEST DEFINITION of a weed that I ever read was coined by a learned director of Kew Gardens, Sir Edward Salisbury, who wrote, ‘A weed is a flower in the wrong place.’ Or, more generally, ‘A plant growing where we do not want it.’ (GOTM, 135)
Chapter 4
BROADENING THE FIELD
Throughout Nichols’s gardening writing, he maintains an abiding interest in four specialties: the Lilliputian world of rock gardens, the ecological renewal in planting trees, the extended growing possibilities through greenhouses, and especially the underappreciated joys of winter-blooming plants.
MINIATURE MOUNTAINS
IT SEEMS ALMOST incredible that I could have been such a fatuous and ignorant optimist as to imagine that this was the way to make a rock garden—without any plan, without even an adequate preparation of the soil…. It reminded me of those puddings made of sponge-cake and custard, which are studded with almonds until they look like some dreadful beast thrown up from the depths of the sea. (DTGP, 111–112)
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WHEN YOU ARE making a Rock Garden … you must be bloody, bold and resolute. By this I mean that you must stand at a little distance from your slope, visualize a certain broad design, and decide there and then to carry out that design, cost what it may. (DTGP, 114)
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YOU MUST BE monstrously extravagant with your rocks. By which I mean that you must push them really deep into the earth…. It would be much more soothing to stick the rock on the top of the slope so that you could say ‘Look at my enormous rock! How rich I am to be able to afford such enormous rocks!’ But if you do stick the rock up like that, you will eventually take a hatred to it. Also, nothing will grow on it, and anyway it will certainly fall down. (DTGP, 115)
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I HAVE ALWAYS been a fervent advocate of birth-control, but since I have been the owner of a rock garden my fervour has increased a hundred-fold. The prolificacy of the common saxifrage is positively embarrassing. The speed with which the rock rose reproduces itself brings a blush to the cheek. Violas appear to have absolutely no self-control, and as for the alyssum—well, if we behaved like the alyssum, Australia would be over-populated before the year is out. (DTGP, 116)
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THE CHARM OF a rock garden is essentially Lilliputian. To extract the keenest pleasure from it you must be able to diminish yourself—you must acquire the talent for shrivelling yourself up into a creature that is able to walk, in spirit, under the tiny saxifrages, and shiver with alarm at their heavy weight of blossom, to climb, in your mind’s eye, the mossy stones, and grow dizzy on their steep escarpments. (DTGP, 123)
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NOW THAT I was once again a regular subscriber to the garden magazines, the advertisements of the rock-garden merchants seemed like a personal affront. Campanulas three inches high—that was one of the things that made me gnash my teeth…. The advertiser said they would never be more than three inches high, and for some weeks, at least, one would have the pleasure of believing him. Belief is much more fruitful (and much saner) than doubt. Which is one of the secrets of a happy life. (GGTC, 219)
INTO THE WOODS
TO ME ALL woods are enchanted. I cannot imagine being lonely in them…. There are those who shiver and throw uneasy glances behind them when they plunge from the open country into the narrow, tortuous corridors of the trees—and many will skirt the borders of a wood rather than enter its dark recesses. But I feel that the trees are my friends, that I could wander naked among them without hurt, and sleep unharmed among their sturdy roots. (DTGP, 151–152)
THE WHOLE SENSE and spirit of a wood is at once aloof and protective—it retreats from you and yet it shelters too—brushing your cheeks with a sweet caress in spring, laying in autumn a pale, petalled carpet of fallen leaves at your feet, lacing the winter skies with an iron grille of frozen arms. (DTGP, 152)
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A BEECH WOOD, which—like all beech woods—was pretending to be a cathedral. (SOTL, 154)
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THERE IS SOMETHING lamb-like and poignantly innocent about the shrill green of a baby walnut tree. And all the very young conifers are fascinating, for you can almost see them grow. Half the fun of a wood is this memory of growth—this happy mental catalogue of branches that began as babies, are now reaching manhood, and oneday, will shelter you as you creep slowly beneath them towards the dying sun. (DTGP, 184)
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IF YOU ARE in a position to plant a wood, and if you refrain from doing so, you must be, ipso facto, of a bleak and sullen disposition. You are to be shunned. It is arguable that your very existence should be made an offence in law. (MH, 176)
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PLANTING A TREE is one of the most satisfying things a man can do. When you plant a tree you are perpetuating life, enriching the lovely land you live in, storing up a treasure house of beauty for your old age. (GOTD, 230)
PEOPLE IN GLASS HOUSES …
TO GO TO the greenhouse when the weather is wild, to close the door, to stand and listen to the wind outside, to the rain that slashes the frail roof, to see, through the misted glass, the black, storm-tossed branches of distant elms, to take a deep breath, to savour to the full the strange and almost uncanny peace which this frail tenement creates—to me this is one of the truest joys which life has given. (DTGP, 210–211)
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THERE IS NO more agreeable way of spending a lazy hour than by going down to the greenhouse and gravely swivelling all the pots whose plants are craning eagerly to the light. It makes one feel very grand and powerful. (GGTC, 151)
IT IS ALL so exhilarating that one wonders, not for the first time, why people do not live in greenhouses for ever. If everybody lived permanently in greenhouses, nobody—surely—would be foolish enough to start a war. (MH, 145)
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A FLOWER OR a weed! I do not care whether they are weeds, in winter, in the greenhouse, in those little sheltered boxes. It is enough that they are green, that their leaves are like fans, that their stems are of infinite delicacy, with a mist of faint and poignantly adolescent hair, which is gilded by the lamplight. (DTGP, 223–224)
MID-WINTER MADNESS
EVEN IN THE grimmest winter days a garden can give an appearance of discipline, and a certain amount of life and colour, no matter how wild the winds nor dark the skies. (DTGP, 25)
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THIS PASSION FOR winter flowers has its roots deep, deep within me. I have a horror of endings, of farewells, of every s
ort of death. The inevitable curve of Nature, which rises so gallantly and falls so ignominiously, is to me a loathsome shape. I want the curve to rise perpetually…. I want my garden to go on. I cannot bear to think of it as a place that may be tenanted only in the easy months. I will not have it draped with Nature’s dust sheets. (DTGP, 52–53)
A buttercup field in mid-January! That is what the aconites will do for you, if you buy enough of them…. You cannot have too many aconites…. A thousand will make a brave splash of colour, which lasts a month. If you can afford ten thousand, you are mad not to buy them. (DTGP, 63)
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THE FEATHERY, SPIDERY, yellow exuberance of this darling plant! For was there ever such bravery, such delicious effrontery, as is displayed, on many quiet walls throughout England, by the witch-hazel in mid-winter? Oh, it is much to be praised, infinitely to be exalted, this strong and delicate flower! There is something theatrical about it. To discover it, on a dark day, glistening epigrammatically in a forsaken world, magnificently pert and yellow, is so inspiring that one’s hands automatically begin to clap. (DTGP, 66)
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IF YOU WANT a finer flower than [Iris unguicularis] in winter, you had better go and lock yourself up in your greenhouse and sing hymns. (DTGP, 70)
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I HAD TO be content with protecting a few of the rarer winter flowers…. Every night, when I went to bed, I opened my window, and gently lifted in a spray of wistaria, which had clambered up to the glass and was beating its frozen fingers on the pane. (ATR, 168–169)
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JANUARY WAS GAY and absurdly spring-like. Birds sang. There were sheets of golden aconites under the elm. The snowdrops laughed all day long. Somebody had told them that life was hard and difficult, whereas they found it bland and easy and delightful. (ATR, 175)