WHITE ROSE LA GUIRLANDE; GREY BORDERS BEYOND.
CLEMATIS RECTA.
Though there is as yet but little bloom in this end of the border the picture is complete and satisfying. Each one of the few flower-groups tells to the utmost, while the intervening masses of leafage are in themselves beautiful and have the effect of being relatively well disposed. There is also such rich promise of flower-beauty to come that the mind is filled with glad anticipation, besides feeling content for the time being with what it has before it. There is one item of colouring that strikes the trained eye as specially delightful. It is a bushy mass of Clematis recta, now out of bloom. It occurs between the overhanging purple Clematis and the nearer groups of Cineraria maritima and Santolina. The leaves are much deeper in tone than these and have a leaden sort of blueness, but the colouring, both of the parts in light and even more of the mysterious shadows, is in the highest degree satisfactory and makes me long for the appreciative presence of the rare few friends who are artists both on canvas and in their gardens, and most of all for that of one who is now dead[1] but to whom I owe, with deepest thankfulness, a precious memory of forty years of helpful and sympathetic guidance and encouragement in the observation and study of colour-beauty.
[1] The late H. B. Brabazon.
One cannot write of the garden in July without a word of the Roses. Besides the bushy garden Roses, and the kinds of special charm, such as Damask, Provence, Moss and China, those that most nearly concern the garden for beauty and pictorial effect are the rambling and climbing Roses that flower in clusters.
In "Roses for English Gardens" I dealt at some length with the many ways of using them; here I must only touch upon one or two of these ways. But I wish to remind my readers of the great value of these free Roses for running up through such trees as Yews or Hollies in regions where garden joins hands with woodland, and also of their great usefulness for forming lines of arch and garland as an enclosure to some definite space. I have them like this forming the boundary on two sides of a garden of long beds, whose other two sides are a seven-foot wall and the back of a stable and loft. Just beyond the arch in the picture (p. [60]), and dividing the little garden in two, is the short piece of double border that is devoted to August.
