The Yellow Fumitory on wall (Corydalis lutea).
Large Japan Sedum (S. spectabile) and Autumn Crocuses in the Wild Garden.
CHAPTER XII.
SOME RESULTS.
In addition to Longleat, and other cases previously mentioned, a few of the results obtained, where the system was tried, and so far as known to me, may not be without interest. How much a wild garden intelligently and tastefully carried out may effect for a country seat is fairly well shown in a garden in Oxfordshire. Here is one of the earliest, and probably one of the largest wild gardens existing, and which, visiting it on the 27th May, I found full of novel charms. No old–fashioned garden yields its beauty so early in the year, or over a more prolonged season, than the wild garden, as there is abundant evidence here; but our impressions shall be those of the day only. It may serve to throw light on the possibilities of garden embellishment in one way at a season when there is a great blank in many gardens—the time of “bedding out.” The maker of this had no favourable or inviting site with which to deal; no great variety of surface, which makes attempts in this direction so much easier and happier; no variety of soil, which might enable plants of widely different natural habitats to be grown; only a neglected plantation, with rather a poor gravelly soil and a gentle slope in one part, and little variety of surface beyond a few gravel banks thrown up long before. The garden is, for the most part, arranged on each side of a Grass drive among rather open ground, few trees on the one hand and rather shady ground on the other. The most beautiful aspect at the end of May of a singularly ungenial spring, which had not allowed the Pæonies to unfold, was that of the German Irises, with their great Orchid–like blossoms seen everywhere through the wood, clear above the Grass and other herbage, stately and noble flowers that, like the Daffodils, fear no weather, yet with rich and delicate hues that could not be surpassed by tropical flowers. If this wild garden only should teach this effective way of using the various beautiful and vigorous kinds of Iris now included in our garden flora, it would do good service. The Irises are perfectly at home in the wood and among the Grass and wild flowers. By–and–by, when they go out of flower, they will not be in the way as in a “mixed border,” tempting one to remove them, but grow and rest quietly among the grass until the varied blossoms of another year again repay the trouble of substituting these noble hardy flowers for some of the familiar weeds and wild plants that inhabit our plantations.[ill94]