The snapdragons once played a joke on the garden. I was ordering some seeds from Sutton’s, and said, “I want some very hardy snapdragons, that will stand being planted in the windiest part of the garden where nothing of any height will grow.” The seeds were guaranteed to grow in the most uprooting of hurricanes.
In due time the seedlings appeared above ground, and Ursula devoted several back-aching evenings to planting them out into the windswept beds. By the middle of the following summer those jaunty snapdragons had each grown six feet high, and there, waving in that exposed place, where any well-conducted plant would have sternly refused to grow more than a foot high, was a plantation of great flowers, each tied to a stout stake like hollyhocks, and the blooms seemed to have outgrown their normal size just as the rest of the plants had done.
Of course, people came from ever so far to gaze at these snapdragons; and unbelievers surreptitiously pulled out tape-measures and two-foot rules, and one and all, after meditating seriously on the subject, and looking at it from all points of view, would finally shake their heads and say, “Well, I’ll just tell you what it is—the place evidently suits them.” We never got any further than that!
By every law and reason known to properly-trained gardeners and horticulturists, this garden ought to be able to produce nothing but low-growing flowers and shrubs. Every local resident kindly volunteered this information directly he or she set eyes on the cottage; they said it was too high up, too bleak in winter, too exposed, too dry, too rocky, or too glaringly sunny—for anything above six inches high to have a chance in it.
And yet Nature goes on laughing at the pessimists, and so do those who tend this flower-patch. And the columbines, yellow, pink, pale blue, purple, and white, send up tall heads of flower. The coreopsis plants grow so big and bushy they have to be staked. The cornflowers, a streak of blue at the end of the cabbage bed, are taller than the broad beans adjoining. Then there are the hollyhocks and the larkspurs—these hold their heads as high as anyone could desire, and the tall red salvias are not far behind. The foxgloves are also a brave sight (though I do not include in this category those that are buried under the tree-lupins!).
Of course, there are low-growing things in the garden as well as the more lofty-minded. There is one bed that is a ramping mass of giant mimulus of various colours. Convolvulus minor spreads about the ground in one of the white lily beds; and eschscholtzias cover the earth for another row of lilies. Pansies rove about at their own sweet will in this garden, and the old-fashioned white pinks and the pink variety spread themselves out over the big stones that edge the borders.
The mignonette bed has a row of lavenders at the side, and mounds of nasturtiums grow where the earth is too rocky and barren to support anything else.
Naturally, there are hedges of sweet peas; sometimes they are heavy with flowers, sometimes the slugs or birds settle the matter at the beginning of the season. One hedge runs along at the back of the herb garden, and the herbs have so spread themselves out that the sweet peas were getting swamped. Virginia has been cutting them back.
Do you know what the scent of cut herbs is like on a hot summer day, with sweet peas in the background? In this herb garden there is sage, with its lovely blue flowers, lemon thyme, silver thyme, savory, hyssop, lavender, rosemary, rue, balm, marjoram, black peppermint, spearmint and parsley.
In this bed also grows the old-time bergamot, with its heavily-scented leaves and lovely tufts of crimson flowers.