The English Flower Garden / with illustrative notes

by Henry Arthur Bright

And this latest fancy is itself falling into the further degradation of carpet-bedding. That a carpet should imitate a flower-bed is one thing; years ago in Casa Guidi Windows, Mrs. Browning wrote of some carpets, where

“your foot
Dips deep in velvet roses.”

This may be well enough; but who wants flower-beds to look like carpets? They may strike you at first as being ingenious, and even pretty, but the feeling is at once followed by a sense of their essential debasement as regards gardening. No flower is permitted, and the glorification of stonecrops and houseleeks is the chief result. But indeed the geometrical figures of the carpet-bedding are not the worst. The gardeners are now trying their skill in designs on their carpet-beds, and names, mottoes, coats of arms, and other frivolities, are becoming common. The most stupid follies of the Topiarian age were graceful and sensible compared to this. It is less childish to trim a yew-tree into a peacock than to arrange your sedums and alternantheras to look like animals on a badly-woven carpet. Nor has the absurdity even the merit of being original. It is really an old French invention, and about the time of Henry IV. the gardens at Fontainebleau and Chantilly were known for their quaint devices in flowers, their ships, armorial bearings, and cyphers interlaced. The whole matter has been well summed up by Sir Joseph Hooker, who writes:

“It is indeed astonishing that the asters, helianthus, rudbeckias, silphiums, and numberless other fine North American plants, all so easily grown and so handsome, should be entirely neglected in English gardens, and this in favour of carpets, hearthrugs, and ribbons, forming patterns of violent colours, which, though admired for being the fashion on the lawn and borders of our gardens and grounds, would not be tolerated on the floor of a drawing-room or boudoir.”[4]

Well, as we can do nothing worse in this direction, we may at last hope for a reaction, in which a new school, with some regard to nature, but without the extravagance of the old “picturesque” gardeners, may bring us back to good taste and common sense.

It is of course absolutely impossible to form even an estimate of the number of bedding-out plants used in our gardens during a single season, to be discarded when the season ends. It must be something enormous. One single florist in the neighbourhood of London sends to market annually more than 80,000 plants of one description of pelargonium alone. It is calculated that the bedding-out of a single good-sized garden will take at least 100,000 plants to make it effective.

But now, leaving the question of summer bedding-out, we are glad to note signs of real advance in other directions. It is something that within the last ten or fifteen years our gardeners should have discovered that bare earth, all spring, is not particularly beautiful, and should have taken to what is called Spring gardening. All flowers are welcome in spring, and even masses of double daisies are acceptable. But indeed in all the most elaborate bedding-out of summer, there is nothing that can give greater pleasure for colouring than a blue lake of Myosotis dissitiflora, or of autumn-sown Nemophila insignis. Then again, owing to our more rapid and easy intercourse with Holland and Belgium, tulips and hyacinths, which, however, were always in favour, are more used than they were some years ago. The quantities sent over by the gardeners of the Low Countries must be very great. Not only do the choicer bulbs go to our own nurserymen, but they are now sent direct to many private gardens; while large auction sales in London, Liverpool, and elsewhere, clear off the inferior roots or those exported by the less well-known growers. Mr. Burbidge tells us that the value of the flower-roots sent from Holland a year or two ago was nearly 60,000l., and one English grower imports annually 160,000 tulip bulbs. A certain proportion of these will be required for forcing purposes for the house and the conservatory, but many more will be used in the open garden. A bed of well-grown tulips is certainly a very beautiful object, and there are some at least who believe in the rich fragrance of the tulip, which a living poet says “might be the very perfume of the sun.”

Besides the spring garden, there is in some places the Semi-tropical garden, and in others the Alpine garden. No one has done more than has Mr. W. Robinson[5] to call up an interest in the broad-foliaged plants which are the chief ornament in the gardens of Paris, and in the delicate tufts of flowers which nestle in the crevices of our rockeries. But there is much still to be done. It is, after all, only occasionally that either Semi-tropical or Alpine gardening is to be seen in any perfection. For the former, Battersea and Victoria Parks are extremely good, and for the latter the Messrs. Backhouse’s nursery, near York, has a deserved reputation. Many very handsome semi-tropical plants are all but hardy, and require at most only a protection during the winter months. The canna was known to Gerard and to Cowley, and needs no more care than a dahlia. The Pampas grass and Arundo conspicua are perfectly hardy. The Arundinaria falcata is rather more tender, but unless it flowers, when, like the American aloe, it will die, it will generally spring up from the root, even when its long canes themselves are cut by the frost. The aralia, ricinus, and others, are no doubt safer for being housed during the winter, and then plunged, either as centres for flower-beds, or as separate shrubs in the outside garden. Nothing gives greater character to any garden than the occasional introduction of plants like these. They are now indeed all the more needed since the old plan of having orangeries has so nearly disappeared. And yet how well worth the trouble—the very little trouble—that it cost, the orangery always was. Nothing could be more stately than a broad walk, along the sides of which were ranged the orange-trees, each in its huge tub, and each fruit-bearing and flowering together. And with the orange-trees would be the white-blossoming myrtles and the Clethra arborea, with its scented sprays, like lily-of-the-valley.

As regards the Alpine garden, the first thing to be remembered is, that the rockwork on which it is to be formed should look as natural as possible. Nothing can be more hideous than the usual varieties of suburban rockeries, where the intention seems to be to make everything as unnatural and distorted as can well be imagined How well one knows the jagged fragments of red sandstone standing on end, or the blocks of various formations heaped up together, with bits of green glass, coarse coral, and big shells stuck in at different corners, and with cement between to keep all in place.[6] The rocks used should, if possible, be the rocks of the country; they should appear to crop up from the soil; and they should be so laid that plants should really be able to grow in their fissures and interstices. Scarcely less important is the choice of a site, for if the rock-garden is placed under the drip of trees it is hopeless to expect that any of the more delicate and beautiful Alpine plants can thrive. Most ferns, on the other hand, will of course do better in moist, shady places; so that it is impossible successfully to combine the Alpine garden and the fernery, as is very often attempted. Let the Alpine plants have sun and light, and give the ferns the cool shade in which they are most at home. Aquilegias and a few other woodland flowers may be planted in among the osmunda, the hart’s-tongue, and other hardy ferns; and rare mosses and lichens may be taught to cling to the darker clefts and hollows of the rock, as in one rockery which I know, where the “shining moss” (Schistostega pennata) catches and refracts the sunlight with a metallic lustre like that of the humming-bird’s breast.