Is the wall sunny? All right; the wallflowers laugh at you, pinks climb over the top edge, just to see what is going on down below; one baking spot supports a mass of sage about a yard and a half in diameter, a smother of blue flowers in the summer; no one planted it, it just came! A red ribis has hooked itself in at one spot; what it lives on I don’t know; while white, mauve and purple Honesty seeds itself everywhere, making a brave show of colour in the spring. In fact, white and mauve are the prevailing colours on the walls in April.
Later on you may expect—and will find—anything; for annuals and bi-annuals seed themselves, continually dropping the seed to a lower level; hence there is always a self-planted garden bed at the base of each wall, reminiscent of what was growing above the season before.
On the shady side of one wall, we have made a moss garden—it was Virginia’s idea, and she takes a very special pride in it, adding new sorts whenever she finds them. Hence you will sometimes find her coming home from a ramble, carrying a huge stone with her, or lugging along a veritable boulder. In this way she brings the moss home, local habitation and all, annexing any stone she sees (a wild stone, of course, not a tame one from someone’s garden wall) that bears a promising crop of some new variety.
As a result, she fairly bulges with pride whenever she exhibits the moss garden, and explains how much of it is her own particular handiwork.
We have not yet settled whether she ought to pay me rent for my wall that she uses for her moss garden, or I ought to pay her wages for moss-gardening my wall.
One characteristic of this garden is an ever-changing show of colour. It varies according to the season, but whatever the time of year there are usually gorgeous splashes of colour that make you stand and wonder.
Do not forget that this is only a cottage garden, even though it is a roomy one. I hope you are not picturing to yourself an orthodox country-house garden, with expanses of well-kept lawns, with proper-looking beds of geraniums, and lordly pampas grass at intervals, and well-groomed rose-bushes in tidy beds, and correct herbaceous borders, and beds of begonias and heliotropes planted out from the greenhouses, and all the other nice-mannered, polite flowers that every well-paid, certificated gardener conscientiously insists on planting in exactly the same way all the country over.
This garden grows a little of everything, and a great deal of some things, and when you look at it you might easily imagine that everything had planted itself just where it pleased. The garden is not tidy, for the things are constantly growing over each other, and then out across the paths. Moreover, it lacks someone there all the time to keep it tidy; the ministrations of the handy man are decidedly erratic. But at least it is bright, always bright, and you can pick as many flowers as you please—handfuls, armfuls, apronfuls—with no fear of an autocratic gardener glaring at you; and the flowers will never be missed.
In the spring wallflowers predominate, every colour that the modern varieties produce. Ursula’s remark that she had planted over nine hundred seedlings was well within the mark. A thousand or two of wallflower seedlings do not go very far in this garden, because at one time of the year the place appears to be a waving mass of wallflowers from end to end.
And have you any idea what the scent is like when you have thousands of wallflowers smiling on a sunny spring morning?