PICKING UP WRINKLES
We have had a frightful disappointment in the “Miss Wilmott” Verbenas. For two summers it has been the same story. Last year they came up “all colours,” though purchased from a well-known firm! This year, to make quite sure, we ordered seedlings to be specially grown for us from a local nursery. The wretch has sent a collection of measly little starveling things which cannot be expected to do anything for weeks and weeks. Of course they should not have been accepted; but the deed was done in our absence. We are much inclined to have the beds cleared, and Heliotrope or rose-coloured Ivy-leaf Geraniums put in instead. It is too late for anything else. Gardeners are so tiresome! They are as bad as cooks, who will accept with perfect equanimity, fish ready to illustrate the proverb and game prepared to walk to its own funeral, and then say that “they thought it was ‘a bit high’ perhaps, but they weren’t quite sure!”
We have forced for the house several plants of Canterbury Bells, glorious purple and white, which have grown to an extraordinary size and fill the Compton pots on the landing in very decorative fashion.
The front landing and stairs are wondrous pretty in the Villino: and the colour scheme—Tangerine yellow for the curtains and grey for the carpet—somehow suits the little place, with its Roman air. In the round bow window there is a large copy of the Samothraki Nike on a white stand; and in front of her we place flower-pots all the year round—generally Orange trees in the winter, with which we are successful.
Alas! we leave the little Paradise to-morrow! However, we are still in such an intermediary stage that we mind less than when we lost all the glories of the Azaleas. For anyone of an impatient disposition, this time of the first setting out of the bedding plants is a trying ordeal. We are going this afternoon on a surreptitious round with “plantoids” to which Adam objects, but in the virtues of which we are believers.
PITFALLS OF AMBITION
The longer we labour at garden experiences, the more it is borne in upon us that ambitiousness is to be avoided. No amateurs—however splendid their visions may be—should attempt “Wild Gardens,” or “Bog Gardens” on their own unaided efforts. This does not refer to the flinging of wild-flower seeds in woodland glades, but to the digging up of harmless and unobtrusive patches of field and bank for the insertion of seedlings, which apparently will never be at home in that particular aspect and soil. The worst of it is that the energetic workers are so ensnared by the mental vision that they very often fail to perceive the paltriness of the material result.