A Garden of Peace: A Medley in Quietude

by Frank Frankfort Moore

That was three years ago, and although I planted out over three thousand echeverias last summer, 1 had not to buy another box of the same variety; I had only to find some other succulents and transplant some violas in order to achieve all that I hoped for from these beds. For three years they have been altogether satisfying with their orderly habits and reposeful colouring. The glauca is the shade that the human eye can rest upon day after day without weariness, and the pink and blue and yellow and purple violas which I asked for a complement of colours, do all that I hoped they would do.

Of course we have friends who walk round the garden, look at those beds with dull eyes of disapproval, and walk on after imparting information on some contentious point, such as the necessity to remove the shoots from the briers of standard roses, or the assurance that the slugs are fond of the leaves of hollyhock. We have an occasional visitor who says,—

“Isn't carpet-bedding rather old-fashioned?”

So I have seen a lady in the spacious days of the late seventies shake her head and smile pityingly in a room furnished with twelve ribbon-back chairs made by the great Director.

“Old-fashioned—gone out years ago!” were the terms of her criticism.

But so far as I am concerned I would have no more objection to one of the ribbon-borders of long ago, if it was in a suitable place, than I would have to a round dozen of ribbon-back chairs in a panelled room with a mantelpiece by Boesi and a glass chandelier by one of the Adam Brothers. It is only the uninformed who are ready to condemn something because they think that it is old-fashioned, just as it is only the ignorant who extol something because it happens to be antique. I was once lucky enough to be able to buy an exquisitely chased snuff-box because the truthful catalogue had described it as made of pinchbeck. For the good folk in the saleroom the word pinchbeck was enough. It was associated in their minds with something that was a type of the meretricious. But the pinchbeck amalgam was a beautiful one, and the workmanship of some of the articles made of it was usually of the highest class. Now that people are better educated they value—or at least some of them value—a pinchbeck buckle or snuff-box for 'its artistic beauty.

We see our garden more frequently than do any of our visitors, and we are satisfied with its details—within bounds, of course. It has never been our ambition to emulate the authorities who control the floral designs blazing in the borders along the seafront of one of our watering-places, which are admired to distraction by trippers under the influence of a rag-time band and other stimulants. We do not long so greatly to see a floral Union Jack in all its glory at our feet, or any loyal sentiment lettered in dwarf beet and blue lobelia against a background of crimson irisine. We know very well that such marvels are beyond our accomplishment. What we hoped for was to have under our eyes for three months of the year a number of beds full of wallflowers, tulips, and hyacinths, and for four months equally well covered with varied violas, memsembrianthium, mauve ageratum, the præcox dwarf roses, variegated cactus used sparingly, and as many varieties of eche-veria used lavishly, with here and there a small dracaena or perhaps a tuft of feathery grass or the accentuations of a few crimson begonias to show that we are not afraid of anything.

We hold that the main essential of the beds of the House Garden is “finish.” They must look well from the day they are planted in the third week of May until they are removed in the last week of October. We do not want that barren interval of a month or six weeks when the tulips have been lifted and their successors are growing. We do not want a single day of empty beds or colourless beds; we do not want to see a square inch of the soil. We want colour and contour under our eyes from the first day of March until the end of October, and we get it. We have no trouble with dead leaves or drooping blooms—no trouble with snails or slugs or leather-jackets. Every bed is presentable for the summer when the flowers that bloom in the spring have been removed; the effect is only agreeably diversified when the begonias show themselves in July.

Is the sort of thing that I have described to be called carpet-bedding? I know not and I trow not; all that I know is that it is the sort of thing that suits us.

Geometry is its foundation and geometry represents all that is satisfying, because it is Nature's closest ally when Nature wishes to produce Beauty. Almost every flower is a geometrical study. Let rose bushes ramp as they may, the sum of all their ramping is that triumph of geometry, the rose. Let the clematis climb as unruly as it may, the end of its labours is a geometrical star; let the dandelion be as disagreeable as it pleases—I don't intend to do so really, only for the sake of argument—but its rows of teeth are beautifully geometrical, and the fairy finish of its life, which means, alas! the magical beginning of a thousand new lives, is a geometrical marvel.