Authors: Margery Fish
Another plant I tried several times was
Delphinium nudicaule.
Once it liked me so well that it produced some fine fat buds, which I watched with daily excitement. Then one day to my horror I found that the whole top of the plant had been sliced off. Walter thought the buds were seed pods, and so off came their heads. When I remonstrated fiercely all the satisfaction I got was that he didn’t think much of it anyhow and I’d do much better to stick to ordinary delphiniums!
One thing I never discovered and that was whether he was deliberately trying to teach me to leave experimental gardening alone until I had learnt to grow the ordinary things properly. I assumed that these regrettable incidents were not intentional, but they may have been part of a campaign.
Another thing we didn’t agree about was my attempt to have flowers blooming all the year round. He felt very strongly that a good summer garden was what one really wanted, because to him the summer was the time when one enjoyed a garden. He seldom put his nose outside in the winter, and he felt that by filling the garden with things that bloomed early and late I was not leaving enough room for that terrific summer display. I know a lot of people feel the same way, and if I went to Scotland every August I might concentrate on spring and early summer, and if spring was the favoured holiday time make June and July the season of triumph. Since I first made my garden I have given this question of all-theyear-round garden much thought and I have devoted two chapters to the subject. But in those early days Walter thought I was attempting the impossible, and for his sake I had to cram as many of the showy summer flowers into the beds, but I tried to extend the season by planting as much as I could in the walls and between the stones, so that very early in the year aubrieta, alyssum, saxifrages and arabis foamed over the paths and steps. For autumn display Michaelmas daisies met with approval but I was warned not to allow too many yellow flowers to creep into the autumn garden. There was always too much yellow in spring and autumn for Walter and we were always striving for more red and flame in these seasons. Gladioli were the obvious answer in the autumn, but we found them the most ungraceful plants to grow. Of course they should be grown in a kitchen garden for cutting, but we tried them in various places but they were always too stiff to mingle gracefully with a mixed border such as I was trying to achieve. Walter had an idea they could be planted among rose-trees to supply interest when the roses were over, with a ground cover of white alyssum or violas. But it didn’t work out as he had hoped, so gladioli were banished from our garden.
All this time we were doing our best to improve our terrible clay. We had endless bonfires and Walter tried so hard to get me to take the ash for the garden before rain had had a chance to wash some of its goodness into the soil. I wouldn’t admit the necessity. There was always something else more important I wanted to do and it was often a week before I trundled it off to my flower beds. Now, of course, I am as fervent a disciple as Walter ever was. All the wood ash from my open fires is shared among the plants that particularly like potash, magnolias and irises particularly, and I give some to the raspberries, and in the winter the apple trees get their share. When I grew potatoes and tomatoes they, too, were lucky. To distribute it evenly throughout the rest of the garden I now incorporate it in my compost.
Everyone has a theory about composting. I got my recipe from an American book, and I find it works out well. All green stuff is put in a heap to rot down. Perennial weeds and evergreen material are not used, but everything else, including kitchen refuse, grass cuttings, great mountains of nepeta, aubrieta, Michaelmas daisies and all the other herbaceous things that are cut down. For the kitchen refuse I keep a big brown pot (commonly known as ‘the gash’) on the window sill behind the sink, and into it go all the tea-leaves, apple peels, onion skins and coffee grounds. Also crushed egg shells. Walter made a great fuss about the egg shells, he disliked them so and contended that it was silly to bother about them when I could get all the lime I wanted for a few pence. But I think my plants enjoy a mixed diet and I would not deny them little tit-bits of shell, but I did see that they were crushed very finely so that they did not intrude too forcibly on my lord’s eye. I noticed great mounds of coffee grounds at Kew, so I know I am on firm ground there, and as for tea-leaves, you have only to see what emptying the teapot does to a wilting plant. I have known trees and shrubs brought back from the dead by having tea and tea-leaves administered to them after every
meal, and I am sure one reason why Madonna lilies thrive in cottage gardens and not in ours is because they get tea and washing up water and all manner of good things given to them. I don’t like the messiness of tea-leaves thrown on the flower beds, but I use them and the tea that is left in the teapot in the compost. The liquid is particularly good, in fact a necessity, for in very dry weather the compost heap needs generous watering to speed decay.
I leave this heap until it is quite brown, and then I combine it with other ingredients to stand again. How long one leaves it depends on the speed of decomposition and the supply of material. I have now built up such reserves that the making of the final heap is done in the winter, and the following autumn I have a plentiful supply of super nourishment with which to enrich the garden.
My final heap is made in four layers, repeated until all the material is used up. First there is a generous layer of my rotted com post, then an equal depth of farmyard manure. This is then covered with earth and thickly dusted with wood ash. Pipes are inserted vertically at regular intervals down the heap as it is being built, so that it shall be ventilated. I like to use very young manure so that a high temperature kills any weed seeds that may be lurking in the compost. As my natural soil is clay, and such heavy clay that it doesn’t change a bit during its year’s sojourn in the heap but comes out a soggy solid mass, like a layer of marzipan in an Easter cake, I am now using sand instead of soil in the heap, but finish with grass tufts skimmed from the vegetable garden. These turned upside down seal the heap and keep in the heat to do its work thoroughly. Very old sawdust can be used instead of sand but it must be well weathered.
No one can call a compost heap beautiful so I hide mine in a discreet little hedged enclosure—our old friend
Lonicera nitida
again. Another enclosure beyond hides a deep pit where I pile oak and beech leaves for leaf mould, a heap of peat mould and the manure heap.
As a lot of the goodness must seep into the ground from my compost heaps I have had the bottom of the compost enclosure concreted. Instead of having the ground quite level it slopes down very slightly, and along the lower side I have about a foot of vertical concrete (breeze blocks in fact). My compost enclosures are at the top of a ditch, so it has been easy for me to run out three small drains into the ditch. The rich ooze from the heaps drains into receptacles placed to receive it and gives me a constant supply of liquid manure. It is wonderful what a fillip this diluted goo water gives to a plant that is just coming into flower. In the summer the sweet corn particularly is the lucky recipient of this largesse.
There is a theory that if compost is made on a concrete base one will be deprived of the worms which would normally come up from the soil. I don’t know where the worms come from but my heap is always full of very lively, very pink worms, so I haven’t lost these busy little underground workers by working on a clean foundation.
By degrees the soil in the garden is becoming more workable. When we took the house there was only one little patch where the soil was fairly good, and I was told that at one time that end of the house had been a bakery and the baker used to throw out the ash from the faggots he burnt to heat his oven. There must have been plenty of charcoal as well as wood ash to make the soil almost normal, compared with that in the rest of the garden.
Walter used to make me envious by describing the wonderful soil of his garden at Sydenham. After years of working it was fine, rich and dark, and no plant could do anything but its best when invited to reside in it. I used to compare my yellow clay with the soil in gardens that had been gardens for many years, and I never knew why anything ever bloomed for me. They did, and I had surprising results right at the beginning before I became a fussy gardener and took too much trouble.
One of my sisters visiting us during that first summer and seeing flowers blooming in that barren waste airily dismissed the miracle with the remark ‘good soil and beginner’s luck’. The first statement was not true, although the second was. Undoubtedly there is goodness even in weeping clay, and one may get surprising results from virgin soil, but to go on getting them it is necessary to put in as much as is taken out.
That truism applies equally to the mental as well as the material outlook. Gardening is like everything else in life, you get out of it as much as you put in. No one can make a garden by buying a few packets of seeds or doing an afternoon’s weeding. You must love it and then your love will be repaid a thousandfold, as every gardener knows.
I have always felt my family have been very forbearing towards me. Before I was married I didn’t do anything in the garden. Every weekend, when my sisters were navvying to make a garden round the little house we built, I sailed off on my bicycle to play golf. And I never stopped saying the most scathing things about gardeners, what fools they were always to be working and never enjoying their gardens, and what was the good of having a lovely garden if you never had time to sit in it and enjoy it? I shall never forget staying with cousins in Cheshire. It was what they call summer in Cheshire, distinctly chilly, and after Sunday lunch we donned our coats and repaired to the garden with books and deck chairs. Very soon I opened a drowsy eye to see my cousin stealing off to attack a distant flower bed with fork and vigour, and I thought she was slightly mad. I was the mad one. I know now that the real enjoyment is in working in one’s garden. It is very difficult for a gardener to sit with enjoyment seeing all round him jobs that want doing. I often wonder why some zealous gardening relation did not slay me with fork and spade in my unenlightened years.
It took nearly a year to get rid of the pole roses in my terraced garden. We let the house in September 1939 and went to London. Walter became Press Adviser to the Censor and I went with him as his secretary, so it was June 1940 before we saw our garden again.
I think it came as much as a shock to Walter as it did to me. Our tenants were busy on war work and looking after a family in war time. They had done the essentials, such as grass cutting, but the flower garden had received no check or restraint, and it had turned itself into a tropical jungle. The roses had forgotten they were meant to climb up poles, and had sent out long clutching feelers in every direction. An attractive, but particularly invasive, Michaelmas daisy had taken complete control of the garden. This Michaelmas daisy is deceptive. Above ground its fine feathery white flowers are just the foil for stiff flowers such as zinnias and dahlias, but underground its roots run hither and yon like ants from an ant heap. They dash through clumps of other herbaceous plants, entwine themselves round stones and pavings, all the time cover themselves with myriads of shaggy roots which take hold everywhere. My poor garden was a swaying mass of overgrowth. Everything tall had grown taller, nothing had been staked, and the height and untidiness dwarfed the low house below.
It was only a matter of time and extreme ruthlessness to bring some sort of order to the garden again, but when I had done so the resentful roses, now tied back to their poles and having taken their revenge on me by venomous clawings, looked taller and more out of proportion than ever.
Malcolm Keen got rid of the pole roses for me. He first started his campaign by asking if I had ever thought of getting professional advice about the garden from a firm of landscape gardeners. I replied with extreme hauteur that I had not and had no intention of doing so, and closed the subject.
After a few days he opened the attack again. He chose an opportunity when Walter was present and began by a general dissertation on gardens generally and Elizabethan gardens in particular. As he intended he very soon had Walter’s interest and was able to enlarge on his subject. The result was that one happy, triumphant day saw the roses and their beastly poles summarily removed from my garden and planted against the high walls surrounding the garden. Shapely little cypresses (
Chamaecyparis Lawsoniana Fletcheri
) were installed instead.
The improvement was startling, and the effect never ceases to please me. They are just tall and distinct enough to emphasize the curving path as it winds up to the little orchard above, and by judicious pruning have been kept down to the height we originally intended. The nursery who supplied them do this specialists’ job every August, sawing off the top of the main stem when necessary and trimming the trees to keep their neat shape of little pointed puddings. The grey-green foliage is a charming foil for the flowers in the borders and I find, with sand and peat added to the soil round them, hardy cyclamen do very well planted under the shelter of their overhanging branches.
The amazing difference those little trees made to my garden brought home to me how important it is to include some evergreen trees or shrubs in any garden scheme. A formal garden calls for formal plantings of clipped shrubs. On each side of steep steps leading to a higher garden a pair of Irish yews give accent and meaning, a low spreading evergreen clothes an awkward corner, and if it is not possible to train climbers up a house tall conifers planted near will be silhouetted against the bare walls. Years ago I visited Princeton University and the only thing I now remember about the buildings is the clever way the foliage trees were used to emphasize the beauty of the buildings.