by Margery Fish
It was only by chance one day that we discovered that there was a nice stone wall supporting the orchard at the far end. It was completely hidden by a bank. The level of the orchard is several feet above that part of the road, and over many years the earth had sifted down until it had encroached several feet into the road.
The bank all round the orchard was in a deplorable condition, with brambles, docks, nettles and thorns. Nobody had worried about it for many years. With our neat little beech hedge at the top it looked even worse than it was. We both agreed that if we could expose the wall at the end and clean up the bank, level it and plant it with valerian, it would look very nice. The problem, of course, was labour. Walter and the garden boy had other big jobs on hand, and it was considered too much of an undertaking for me.
But in the end I got it done. One of my sisters providentially came for a holiday and helped me clear the weeds from the bank. We had a magnificent time clearing the ground, because there was a lot of bindweed there, as well as the easier weeds. We both agreed that there is no sport in the world that compares with clearing ground of bindweed. It is far more exciting than golf or fishing. Tracing this tenacious creeping Judas of a weed to its source and getting it out without leaving any small broken pieces behind requires skill and patience, and the reward is a barrowload of the obscene twisting white roots and the joy of burning them.
For weeks I wheeled barrowloads of earth along the road, unearthing the wall at one end and improving the bank at the other. In time the finished bank met the clean and self-conscious wall, and I was able to devote myself to the beautifying of both. Hundreds and hundreds of valerian seedlings were planted in the bank and in the wall. For a year or two those in the bank flourished and multiplied, and that bank was a blaze of crimson, white and every shade of pink. But they began to disappear, and now there are hardly any left. We could never fathom the reason why, unless it was that they found the soil that I took from the wall too rich.
We were both very disappointed about this because we admired so much the railway embankments in the district which were ablaze with valerian. The seedlings I planted in the wall never looked back, soon turned themselves into huge plants and raised enormous families I remove thousands of valerian seedlings from the garden every year and for a long time I hopefully put them in the bank, but now I realize it is a waste of time and I throw them away. Odd daffodil bulbs are now planted there, occasional clumps of tall blue scillas and the wild magenta gladiolus, G. byzantinus. They, of course, do not give colour all the year as the valerian would have done.
We tried very hard to keep the grass verges round the house nicely shaven, but again we discovered that gardens and farming don’t mix. Cows come down the road twice a day, and can you blame them if they prefer soft grass to the hard road? In damp weather they reduce the verge to a quagmire, and the tractors that park themselves on the other verge make nearly as much havoc. We still run the mower over the grass near the gate and under the wall, but it is not done very regularly as it is really not worth spending much time on it.
On another occasion Walter had an urge to improve the outlook from our dining-room window. There is a rough triangle of grass on the other side of the road, unkempt and full of nettles, and he thought it should be weeded, levelled and kept tidy. We spent quite a long time on it, and there are still a few valerian left from those I was told to plant, but again we realized our folly. That piece of ground belonged to dogs, children, farm vehicles, stray chickens and endless cats, and later to a telephone kiosk and pole. We had no right to interfere; after all we were the interlopers. Anyone who comes to live in a farming community must realize that the work of the land comes before anything else, and I blush when I think of the things we tried to do. The village belongs to the cows and the tractors and you can’t turn it into a London park.
But though we weren’t very successful in our efforts to take our garden into the road I do admire the people who do. There are certain houses I pass on my various journeys that always make me slow down in admiration. The grass is always nicely cut and the edges neatly trimmed, unlike some places which show a dishevelled face to the road, with nettles and shaggy grass, or brambles sprouting from the bottom of their boundary walls.
17. The Water Garden
When we bought the house our boundary, the ditch, was always full of water, and we bought the strip of the next orchard with the idea of making a wild garden, with water running through it. The banks on both sides were to be tamed and planted, leaving the willows just as they had been when the ditch was purely utilitarian. But again we were disappointed, because as soon as we had widened the bottom of the ditch, and had put down flat stones to make pools and waterfalls, the water disappeared. We never discovered why, because both orchards drained into the ditch, and there is never any shortage of rain in this part of the world. We could only think a new and deeper well had been dug somewhere in the neighbourhood, but gone it had, and now the only time there is water in the ditch is after unusually heavy rain.
My friends are more worried about the disappearance of the stream than I am. They seem to think it will miraculously reappear one day and I am often asked if the water has come back. The absence of water makes it easier to work in the ditch, and I spend a lot of time there. The bank facing east is now made into a series of pockets with lumps of hamstone, and here I grow my primroses and rare polyanthus. Half the opposite side is given up to alpine strawberries, and in the other half I have scooped out all the clay and made a peat garden. It is really easier not to have to bother about gum-boots when I want to work here, but I must say that I should like above all things to have a little running stream somewhere in the garden. Water is so companionable, and though I grow my Asiatic primulas quite well under the trees, with plenty of humus in the soil there is no comparison with them and the wonderful effect of those grown beside water.
At the back of the malthouse the original boundary turned sharply at right angles for the water to drain away at the far side of the garden. A willow was growing crookedly over what should have been water, and it seemed an ideal corner for more stone work. We terraced the ground and made shallow steps down to the stream, and on the other side a little paved court and steep steps up to the orchard. Round the corner we scooped out a lot of the clay and made a wide paved walk with hamstone tiles.
Primulas, Iris Kaempferi and Meconopsis Baileyi were induced to grow against the wall that supported the garden above, and on the orchard side I used large stones in the steep bank, and planted such sun loving things as zauschneria, sternbergia, rock roses and androsace. Walter spent a lot of time constructing a waterfall down the steepest part. He put drainage pipes across the orchard and arranged big stones over which the water was going to tumble to the stream below. Everything was there except the water, and the only waterfall we ever had was the rain splashing down.
We always referred to this little bit of the garden as the Lido, but is was not easy to explain why when no cooling waters washed its shores.
In the end I planted Asiatic primulas in what should have been the bed of our river. It seemed a pity to waste a position so admirably suited to their taste, so I dug out the heavy clay and filled the channel with a good mixture of leaf mould, sand and compost and here the Bartleys, the Postfords, the Millars and their foreign relations enjoy life, with their feet in deep damp earth and their heads in the sun.
18. Rock Gardening
Our garden did not lend itself to a rock garden, as such, in fact I think very few gardens do. A rock garden, to be really convincing must look as if the stratas of rock were really part of the ground, and it must be on a big scale. At Forde Abbey, near Chard, a delightful rock garden winds up through high banks, with enormous rocks that look right. The rock gardens at Wisley, Kew and Edinburgh are equally generous, but unless one has a natural outcrop of rock or a very deep dell or very high bank which will accommodate really large lumps of rock, I think rock gardening should be done in less orthodox ways. The
re is nothing more depressing than a few stones rising self-consciously from a suburban lawn, which is almost as bad as those dreadful Victorian ‘rockeries’, which were nothing but a collection of horrible burrs or lumps of concrete huddled together in a shady, dank corner, where nothing but ferns would thrive.
With all our stones it was inevitable that my mind should turn very quickly to rock plants.
The first home for alpine treasures was expedient rather than intentional, the two rocky beds against the walls of the barton. The second was also forced upon me rather than of my own choosing. The ‘Coliseum’ came into being because we had to dig out the soil that had silted down to the west end of the house. When we first came to live here we couldn’t understand why that end of the house was always so cold and damp, with a strange vault-like smell. It was some time before we realized that about six feet of the wall outside was receiving the clammy embrace of weeping clay.
On digging out the clay we discovered the remains of an enormous fireplace behind the present chimney. This solved the problem of how to support the ground, which was several feet above the level of the foundations. On each side of the fireplace we made a series of steps from our plentiful supply of stones, hence the descriptive label.
I was instructed to plant what I could between the stones, to relieve the hard angular lines, At that time it was literally a case of making bricks without straw as I had practically nothing to use. Looking round the garden I came upon some stonecrop and pounced on it as an answer to prayer. There wasn’t very much and I broke it into small pieces and poked them between the stones. I had no idea that when it settles down in a place it not only starts raising a family but goes in for founding a dynasty as well. I think its name is Sedum spurium and it is the most inveterate invader I have ever met. Sometimes in the summer my heart softens when I see its really pretty flat pink rosettes, but most of the time it is war. Its round brown stems creep down walls, intertwine themselves in its classier neighbours, push under stones and across paths, taking possession with grim determination. If, by an oversight, it is allowed to stay on a piece of a flower bed for more than a minute, in two minutes that flower bed will be a solid mat of stonecrop of a particularly luxuriant quality. Every year I pull out barrowloads of it and I know I shall continue to do so until I die.
Perhaps an even greater error was the introduction of helxine, popularly called ‘Mind your own business’, why I cannot think, because that is the one thing it does not do. I had often seen it bubbling out of pots in cottage windows, and when I saw it spilling out of a broken-down greenhouse of an empty house I thought how pretty and green it was, and how nicely it would help me to soften the grim stones of the old fireplace and the Coliseum. So when a friend offered me some I accepted it with great enthusiasm. She brought it to me in a roll, like a piece of carpet, and I carefully broke it into hundreds of little pieces, tucking them in with love, and watering them with care, and looked forward to a nice little green line between my stones. Helxine is more attractive to look at than stonecrop, except that it does not flower, at least not visibly, but it is even more affectionate. Again I know that I shall be scrapping it from my beds and from under stones for the rest of my days. I tried to cover the top of the old fireplace with this busy little carpeter, but it does not care to come out in the open. Up the sides as much as you like, and everywhere else where it is damp and moist, but not where I most wanted it. Later I used creeping thymes to cover the unsightly broken wall. They like to be hot and dry, and will clamber about in the sun most obligingly.
After I had made the terraced garden I had more walls to play with than I knew what to do with. I grew aubrieta from seed, all kinds of arabis, including the double variety and shades of pink and rose, also Arabis blepharophylla, which one so seldom sees, but which is an excellent wall plant with its tight rosettes of deep green leaves and stiff heads of magenta flowers. One plant of Dianthus caesius gave me innumerable cuttings, and all the rock campanulas were used ad infinitum. Saxifrages were stuffed into crannies, in some places I planted gypsophila to foam over the stones, in another Saponaria ocymoides. The trailing Geranium Traversii, Pritchard’s var., is good on a high wall, as it is generous with its trails, while Geranium sanguineum lancastiense can be used on top of a wall or in a rock crevice.
The rough wall we made round the lawn was another place where I could grow rock plants. Rock roses and androsaces, aethionemas and shrubby thymes thrive in that wall. I grow great mounds of alyssum, more of the lemon coloured variety than the golden, here and there a small lavender or silver plant such as Helichrysum plicatum, and the green leaved Dianthus multiflorus, with its bright cerise flowers, and the salmon pink version, Emil Pare. The perennial cheiranthus and erysimums are excellent plants to choose for a wall like this, as they are mostly low growing, and sit down and spread themselves most satisfactorily. C. Harpur Crewe is better as a border plant as it makes itself into rather a big bush, and gets blown about in the wind, but C. alpinus Moonlight and mutabilis, and Erysimum capitata and Rufus are most obliging.
Creeping thymes soon cover flat surfaces, and Thymus micans works its happy way up the vertical sides of the stones. Erinus seeds itself, and its neat little rosettes covered with white, pink or crimson are most endearing. I am not superior to Erigeron mucronatus, with its smother of pink and white daisies over such a long period, and I love Dryas octopetala, with its creamy flowers and oak leaves, which just pour down in a regular cascade of foliage.
It isn’t only rock plants that grow in walls. Campanula pyramidalis loves to grow in a wall crevice, in fact prefers it to a bed. I have seen aloes growing happily between stones in a wall, and I think nepeta looks better in a wall than anywhere. I put it in my walls, on top of walls, at the edge of supporting walls and at the bottom of walls that rise from paving so that the haze of blue remedies the cold effect of so much stone.
Small primulas and primroses tucked in between the stones at the bottom of a wall are attractive. P. Wanda grown like a chain between stones is quite another plant from the bird pecked horror spaced out at regular intervals between tulips or forget-me-nots. Such little dears as Kinlough Beauty, E. R. Janes and Jill look lovely shyly peeping from under a wall, and where there are big gaps a good clump of polyanthus looks more at home than it does in a formal scheme.
Another good place for rock plants is between the mowing stones that separate the lawn from the wall border. I put large flat pieces of hamstone at the edge of the lawn with the straight edges against the grass and the irregular sides against the bed. Rock phlox and silenes are very happy between the stones, and so is the dwarf iris, I. chamaeiris, in many colours. Double Lychnis Viscaria is not a real rock plant but it wedges itself in between the stones and provides a vivid splash of cerise against paler flowers. Convolvulus mauritanicus is starred with bright blue flowers on a mat of brilliant green until November, and Scabiosa parnassiaelolia makes a hump of very soft green with flowers of sad, pale pink.
To induce plants to grow in an old wall the best way is to choose a damp day, then find a good crevice and scratch out as much mortar as possible. Stuff the hole with damp humus, such as well decayed manure or some compost, and see that there are no air pockets. The smaller the plant the happier it will be, because its roots should be enclosed in a ball of earth before it is pressed into the crevice. To keep the soil moist I cover the whole with damp moss, and if the weather turns warm suddenly keep it watered with a syringe. Sometimes one can wedge a stone over the crevice to keep in the moisture.
Planting in a supporting wall should be done while the wall is being built, if possible, so that the roots can be firmly planted in the soil behind. The wall should slope slightly backwards and at intervals an extra large stone should be pressed back into the soil behind to anchor the structure.
A dividing wall made without cement should be slightly narrower at the top than at the base. Great care must be taken to see that there are no air pockets and the earth must be rammed in with gre
at perseverance at each stage. Again, a large stone, the width of the wall, should be introduced at intervals to make it stronger. A foot or a foot and a half is the best height for such a dry wall.
Some people like to make a double wall, say as a front garden boundary, and for this two narrow cemented walls are made with earth between them. Drainage is important and as well as a deep layer of clinkers at the bottom it is a good idea to put in small agricultural drains about a foot from the top. There should be gaps between the drains, and they should be surrounded with gravel. At one end there should be an inlet so that a hose can carry water through them, because plants in a double wall such as this dry out very quickly. Dwarf polyantha roses are often grown in such a wall, with trailing alpines falling down the outside of the wall. Geraniums give a long season of bloom and these again can be chosen to fall over the edge of the wall.
19.The Paved Garden
The only garden in front of the house was a narrow strip filling in the space made by the L of the house. When we bought the house it was a forest of rusty laurels, and the earth was so heavy and dead that even they showed no enthusiasm. High humpy beds were banked half way up the walls.
We dug out the laurels and levelled the ground and laid crazy paving. It was our first attempt at paving and it wasn’t a good job. The ground wasn’t as perfectly level as it should be for crazy paving, we left cracks between the stones which were much too wide, and we didn’t anchor the stones with joggles of concrete.