ABOUT PERGOLAS, AND MISS JEKYLL’S “WOOD AND GARDEN.”
Miss Gertrude Jekyll’s Wood and Garden: Notes and Thoughts Practical and Critical by a Working Amateur (Longmans) would be welcome if it were only for the convincing way in which she preaches the true gospel of gardening—that there is no hard and fast line between wood and garden, wild and cultivated. She makes her garden melt into her strip of woodland; she plants her wood as well as her garden with flowers. The twelve calendar chapters with which her book opens detail the operations month by month of nature as well as of the gardener. These are followed by chapters on large and small gardens; beginning and learning; the flower-border and the pergola; the primrose garden; the colours of flowers; the scents of the garden; the worship of false gods; novelty and variety; weeds and pests; the bedding fashion and its influence; and masters and men—all of them delightfully illustrated from photographs taken by the author.
For most readers of The Girl’s Own Paper certain parts of the book have less value than others. Much of it is taken up with the gardens of the wealthy. Miss Jekyll’s own garden, which furnishes the backbone of the book, entails considerable expenditure, and is the ideal garden for a moderate-sized manor-house. But she treats her garden as a cottage garden is treated. She buys every plant herself, and puts it into the ground with her own hands, and she keeps her eye on every plant as if it were a child, doctoring it when it is weakly, and removing it when it is obviously unsuited to thrive under those conditions. She pays special attention to the cottage gardens in her neighbourhood, knowing that in them she will get her best object lessons in the survival of the fittest. A cottage wife, to be successful with her garden, has to use the flowers which experience shows will do best in the neighbourhood. Her space is limited; she cannot afford expensive protection against weather, or expensive manures; she cannot afford to renew her plants often. By paying special attention to the gardens of her poor neighbours, Miss Jekyll has secured some of the most luxuriant massings of blossom in her own.
Invaluable advice will be found in the book upon such ordinary subjects as flower-borders, villa gardens, and small town gardens, and Miss Jekyll complements her generalisations on the subject by descriptions of actual gardens of exceptional success and beauty. But I prefer to take for my example of her book something a little more out of the ordinary, which yet is within the reach of families of limited means—the formation of a pergola, especially since it is quite possible to make a pergola in the narrow strip of garden with which Londoners have to be content. What is a pergola? people will ask. Webster, in his great dictionary, defines it thus: “Pergola, n. (It.), Pergula, n. (Lat.) (ancient architecture), a sort of gallery or balcony in a house. Some suppose it to be an arbour in a garden or a terrace overhanging one.” Webster, severe New Englander, had not before his mind the kind of pergola which haunts the memory of the lover of Italy when he is back in prosaic London. To such, a pergola is part not of a house, but of a garden, the framework for an avenue-arbour covered usually with vines, but occasionally with gourds. This framework consists of a long colonnade of snow-white plaster columns which support the cross-rafters over which the vines are trained. And the prettiest ones are those which crown overhanging terraces. For pergolas a single row of columns and a wall are perhaps better suited to our more tempestuous climate. The Italians prefer a double row of columns. Nearly every monastery in the South of Italy has its pergola, as, for example, the often-pictured convent of the Cappuccini at Amalfi. In the winter, when their leaves are off, these pergolas give the effect of a peristyle in Pompeii. Here is Miss Jekyll’s recipe for a pergola.
STONE-BUILT PERGOLA WITH WROUGHT OAK BEAMS.
“I do not like a mean pergola, made of stuff as thin as hop-poles. If means or materials do not admit of having anything better, it is far better to use these in some other simple way, of which there may be many to choose from—such as uprights at even intervals, braced together with a continuous rail at about four feet from the ground, and another rail just clear of the ground, and some simple trellis of the smaller stuff between these two rails. This is always pretty at the back of a flower-border in any modest garden. But a pergola should be more seriously treated, and the piers at any rate should be of something rather large—either oak stems ten inches thick, or, better still, of fourteen-inch brickwork painted with limewash to a quiet stone colour. In Italy the piers are often of rubble masonry, either round or square in section, coated with very coarse plaster, and limewashed white. For a pergola of moderate size the piers should stand in pairs across the path, eight feet clear between. Ten feet from pier to pier along the path is a good proportion, or anything from eight to ten feet, and they should stand seven feet two inches out of the ground. Each pair should be tied across the top with a strong beam of oak, either of the natural shape, or roughly adzed on the four faces; but in any case, the ends of the beams, where they rest on the top of the piers, should be adzed flat to give them a firm seat. If the beams are slightly curved or cambered, as most trunks of oak are, so much the better, but they must always be placed camber side up. The pieces that run along the top, with the length of the path, may be of any branching tops of oak, or of larch poles. These can easily be replaced as they decay; but the replacing of a beam is a more difficult matter, so that it is well to let them be fairly durable from the beginning.”
Miss Jekyll gives illustrations which are reproduced. She says that the climbers which she finds best are Vines, Jasmine, Aristolochia, Virginia Creeper, and Wistaria, and that Roses are about the worst, for they soon run up leggy, and only flower at the top out of sight. I am not familiar with the Aristolochia, but Vines, Jasmine, Virginia Creeper, and Wistaria, all of them grow well in the inner London suburbs such as Chelsea and Kensington much better than Roses. Nearly every London garden has its flower bed, two or three feet wide, running along its wall, and its gravel path, two or three feet wide, running outside that. All that remains therefore is to have brick piers seven feet high built on the outside edge of the gravel path and to have the roof framework carried across from them to the wall. With this a hideous London back garden can be converted into a thing of beauty.
Readers, who are fortunate enough to live in the country and have a strip of woodland adjoining their gardens, should read with great care Miss Jekyll’s admirable advice as to the exotic irises and other flowers which can be made to grow in English woods. A wood garden full of daffodils and irises, anemones and primroses, in their due seasons, is one of the most beautiful things in the world.
Douglas Sladen.
PERGOLA WITH BRICK PIERS AND BEAMS OF ROUGH OAK.