No one will deny for a moment that there is more real joy to be felt over one plant that we have grown for ourselves than over ninety and nine bought ones; and this is not only because attending to its needs has made us love the flower as we love children and other pets and dear dependents—there is another reason. In shop-flowers the method of growth (one of a plant’s greatest beauties) is a charm left out. Sweet Peas, for instance; we buy them squeezed up in tight bunches, all pink ones massed together, or all white or purple. Where is the grace of the clinging tendril, the tender poising of the dainty blooms?
DOUBLE AND SINGLE PYRETHRUMS
I have seen these beauties where Sweet Peas were blowing and growing in the depths of a London area along with white Pinks, Candy-tuft, and the gold-flowered Canary Creeper, but never have I beheld them in the shop: bunches of Cornflowers and even Roses, will be laid against a trail of Smilax, or something else that does not belong to either of them, such as the ever-present “French Fern” or New Zealand grass. Flower-artists of Japan, who willingly spend hours in coaxing each separate twig and flower to show its natural grace and habit, would not much care to arrange the cut flowers we buy in towns, that have been divorced completely from the stems and branches where they grow; and to say this is not to grumble at the florists, who cannot do impossibilities, but to accentuate the fact that cut flowers cannot take the place of growing ones.
Happily for the town gardener, many plants and flowers do well among the chimney-pots. Annuals less so than some, perhaps, but many of these flower satisfactorily if thinly sowed. Nasturtiums, Virginia Stock, Coreopsis, Marigold, Scabious, Sunflower, Lupin, Love-in-a-mist, Candy-tuft and Larkspur never fail us, nor Sweet Pea, if we can keep the sparrows from eating the seeds. Some town-folk tell me they think Carnations really like smoke, so well they thrive in it. Pyrethrums, both single and double, are among our best town flowers, and will grow almost anywhere and in any ordinary garden soil. The one drawback to their well-being is slugs, who find the young growths too enticing; but we can circumvent this enemy if in autumn we sprinkle ashes, soot, or lime around the crowns. In London it is never difficult to get soot, though, oddly enough, every chimney-sweeper considers our own home-made soot his perquisite, and makes us pay for it. The really best way to get rid of slugs is to catch them in orange-peel traps, made of empty half-oranges, under which they crawl, and can then be killed. Sliced potatoe is another good bait, or beet-root. The drawback of using traps is the danger of attracting the enemy. On the other hand, ashes, soot, and lime are unsightly, and may spoil our plants if allowed to touch them. A pail of salt and water we find the least unpleasing medium when culprits must be executed.
In a town garden where there is room for them, no plants do better than the Star-worts or Michaelmas Daisies. They are so easy of cultivation and so comforting late in the season, when the “bedders” of every public and private garden have succumbed to cold and wet. Later there are Chrysanthemums.
Lilies and all bulbous plants show unexpected hardiness. Our parks both east and west familiarize us with Snowdrop, Crocus, Jonquil, Narcissus, and Daffodil; and to see how happy Valley-lilies can make themselves within earshot of the bustling Strand, we need only turn our footsteps towards the dim green gardens of the Temple, where banks and parterres of them unfold their verdant cloaks beneath every April sky. Farther west, if eyes could pierce the trees and shrubs that guard the gardens of the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace, or those round Marlborough House, they would see Lilacs, Laburnums, Pinks, and Roses; and from the knife-board of a Bayswater omnibus, if our field of vision were a little broader, we should catch glimpses of Lord Ilchester’s fair gardens about Holland House, where languorous Lilies of Japan luxuriate in all their native splendour, and much of their native wildness; and this but a stone’s throw from the Great Western Railway Station and the World’s Fair of William Whiteley.
Among the gardens of the suburbs most of our town difficulties disappear; the many nursery, and market, and Rose, and Rock, and Daffodil gardens that flourish in London’s outskirts abundantly prove this. Once away from fog and smoke, there are few limitations except those that come of want of space; but land is dear, and there is little ground to spare, except for public and general gardens, where again individual joys are lost.
The suburban garden, in spite of all the hard things that have been said of it, is really not so much to be despised, and so large a part does it play in the social life of the twentieth century, that it is worth a moment’s thought.
Suburban gardens are of many kinds; there are all manner of notes in the scale. The squalid ones—alas! some are squalid—we see in London’s shabbiest border-lands. They often belong to houses filled with many different families, and are a kind of no man’s land. Hardly can we call them gardens; little enough is grown in them, though sometimes among the straggling Runner-beans and rubbish-heaps there will be a tree, a beautiful spreading tree, like a green-winged angel. Then there are the tidy patches of the fairly well-to-do workman; some made hideous by mounds of shells and grottoes, others filled with useful and pretty plants. So we go upwards, step by step, to the good-sized strip or more ambitious villa garden. Wonders are done in these. Many a busy City man, whose garden is not far from the Marble Arch, knows all about Roses, and might give lessons on Grape-growing and Orchid-forcing to his relations in the real country.