Authors: Margery Fish
Campanula carpatica
is particularly good growing in paving and should be planted at the sides or in the corners of the garden where there is not much traffic. It comes in various shades of blue, as well as purple and white. The three I grow are Isabel, a fine blue, Opal— the most fragile Wedgwood blue, and White Star.
Two good little plants that busy themselves to good effect are
Helichrysum bellidoides
, with tiny ivory everlasting daisies, and
Antennaria dioica alba
or
rosea.
The silver foliage of the latter is soon tightly packed between the stones and throws up myriads of little fluffy flower-heads in white or pink.
The aizoon saxifrages are very neat in the way they pack themselves into small spaces but generous when it come to throwing up a magnificent head of white or pink foamy flowers. Erodiums, either single or double, are ideal for paved gardens, and so is globularia, which, as its name implies, makes a firm mound of very dark green foliage, later to be trimmed with soft blue flowers, rather like a flower trimmed toque. Frankenia has heath-like foliage which turns bronze in the autumn. It makes a heavy mat and is covered with small stemless pink flowers in July and August. The raoulias are arch carpeters.
R. australis
is the most popular and rightly so as there is nothing so silvery as the glistening sheet it makes without lifting its head from the stones. The flowers are microscopic, too, yellow and stemless.
R. glabra
makes an emerald carpet with fluffy cream flowers, while
R. lutescens
makes the merest film of yellow-green, which turns to silver in the autumn.
The foregoing paving plants do not restrict themselves to the spaces left for them but make big mats covering great surfaces of stone. Other carpeters creep along between the stones, filling all the cracks with greenery but hardly intruding above ground. My favourite is
Mentha Requienii
, the tiny creeping mint, with bright green leaves and the tiniest pale mauve flowers. The scent is strong when you press a finger on it, but the time I am most grateful for its fragrance is in the winter, when I brush snow from the paving and the heady scent comes up in waves. I used to think the creeping pennyroyal,
Mentha Tulegium
, was as neat and self-effacing as
Mentha Requienii
, but on closer acquaintance I find it likes to spread itself in rather untidy loops and flusters. But its scent is pleasantly pungent and I wouldn’t be without it. The acaenas offer new foliage colour, A.
Buchananii
is silvery grey with yellow burrs, while
A
.
microphylla
(or
A
.
inermis)
has bronze fern-like foliage and crimson spiny flowers.
Arenaria balearica
will cover everything in sight when it once gets going. It likes to work in damp shady places and then it gets as busy as helxine. But no one minds, so fine and bright is the foliage and so star-like are the tiny white flowers with which it smothers itself in April and May. The cotulas are not very exciting but they make tiny lawns of bright green between the stones. Dresden china daisies are still among the best plants for growing in paving. They enjoy the cool root run and increase rapidly, and they never wander beyond their ascribed domain. Their little bright pink flowers are always welcome, and there is a white version called The Pearl, which looks entrancing in a dark corner. The bigger crimson daisy, Rob Roy, I prefer to use in a flower bed, close up against a paved path. It seems a little too fleshy to grow in paving, but in a bed, where it can spread itself, it makes a delightful crimson accent.
It was difficult to decide what to plant in the narrow beds that border the paved garden. Walter planted as many climbing roses as he could clamber over the walls, and we have a fine selection of Paul’s Scarlet, American Pillar and Mme Abel Chatenay, and since his death I have added the lovely white
Clematis Henryi
and the flashy rose and white King George V. Walter and I could never agree about hydrangeas, he liked them blue and for me the pinker they are the better. So I couldn’t use these wonderful standbys for the narrow beds and had to do with a variation of herbaceous plants, which were never very satisfactory. There isn’t enough room to have a selection that will give flowers over the whole season and Walter was never pleased with my efforts. Sometimes I eked out with such stalwart annuals as zinnias and antirrhinums, and we had small dahlias one year, but the blatant American Pillar rose made colour harmonies extremely difficult.
Now I have fallen back on hydrangeas, from the palest pink to deep rose. Nepeta is planted at the edge of the beds so that it spills over the stones, and I am by degrees inducing it to grow out of the wall too. A few penstemons fill in odd gaps and I find these beds an ideal place to grow
Helleborus orientalis
and
H. foetidus
, as they flower when everything else is dormant.
In the north-east corner of the garden I planted
Hydrangea Mariesii
and it has been a wonderful success, giving enormous blooms until very late in the year.
Helleborus corsicus
does magnificently in this shady corner too, and its great trusses of green flowers bloom from January to June.
Helleborus viridis
is here too, and a delicious apple pink
H. orientalis
which thrives in the cold, and emerges from snowdrifts unscathed. I wonder why these hellebores are not grown more than they are, they give lovely flowers in all shades from green-tinged white to deep plum, just at the time when one needs flowers most, and the flowers last so long. I can see them from my desk bravely standing up to the worst weather of the winter and I admire their fortitude and grace.
On the south side of the paved garden, near the big chimney, I have beds which house all manner of delicate treasures. Freesias planted in the autumn flower outside in April. Nerines and belladonna lilies bloom in the autumn, and here agapanthus remain all the year round and flower magnificently in the summer. The only uncertainty is
Acidanthera bicolor Murieliae.
Sometimes I get a few fragrant blotched blooms before the frost spells doom to my hopes, but many years there is not a single flower. I was told that the way to make them flower was to keep them in a warm place in the winter, so one year I tied them in a paper bag and hung them in the hot air cupboard. A hungry little mouse found them and left me only a few tiny bulblets. I still put them in the warm cupboard in a cardboard box, which I inspect very regularly.
Paved gardens solve a lot of problems and one can make them easy or needing hard work, according to the amount of space allowed between the stones. I know one long wide terrace that is given up entirely to a paved garden, full of delightful things between the stones. It means a lot of regular work to keep it free of weeds and regularly trimmed and tidied, and is not the garden for a busy person, such as a paved patch where the stones are laid entirely in concrete, except for an occasional space. I think paving is very good for a small garden because plants can be put right up against the stones, so that they fall over the paving, and in this way it is possible to get more colour in a small space than with the conventional lawn.
Gardens that have to be left to their own devices, such as the garden of a weekend cottage, always look neat if paving is used instead of grass, and I have known instances where paving is used just as one would use grass, with beds left in it for roses and small shrubs. A very good point about paving is that it is not affected by rain. Beds surrounding a lawn get no attention when the lawn is sodden, but with paving it is possible to go out and work the moment the rain stops.
There are many variations to make paved gardens individual, such as different levels or the introduction of pools and fountains. Walls add interest and here can be used with wonderful effect a lead figure or a sundial or bird bath. Stone urns brimming with flowers help with added colour, or, if there is nothing else, symmetrical bushes or small trees can be used in strategic places.
The shape of the stones used for the paving governs the treatment. With odd shaped stones, usually known as ‘crazy’, the planting can be crazy as you like. With large rectangular flagstones the treatment must necessarily be more restrained. But nature is very kind and knows where to waft a stray seed. The severest schemes soon become human with brave little plants poking up here and there. Even at Wisley the humble
Erigeron mucronatus
has the temerity to put itself in a wall, all among its betters!
Everyone would like to have a herb garden—a little oasis of old world plants and delicate fragrance, with clipped hedges of box or lavender, rosemary or santolina. But it needs a big garden to allow space for such a pleasant corner, and someone with plenty of time, for such a garden, like a Victorian posy, must be kept very trim to be effective.
Even without a herb garden herbs seem to lend themselves to original treatment. I have heard of people putting down an old cart wheel and putting different herbs between the spikes, and sometimes ladders are used in the same way in a long narrow space. But I have never known how the herbs were trained to keep in their own little enclosures. Most herbs are rather woody and distinctly unneat in growth. I defy anyone to keep a healthy sage within bounds, and though one might induce parsley, chives or winter savory to stay between bars, tarragon and mint would wander away underground and come up, quite unabashed, in someone else’s territory.
Another thing I can never understand is why people grow their herbs such a long way from the kitchen. In the old days when the cook gave her orders to the gardener each morning, it was quite simple for him to bring herbs with the vegetables. But in these days when the harassed housewife does the cooking as well as everything else she hasn’t time to go to the vegetable garden every time she wants a sprig of parsley or a pinch of thyme. Some vegetable gardens are quite a long way from the house and when I see in them forests of parsley and great banks of sage, I realize these herbs are so magnificent because they are never used. Knowing how much I resent taking time from the garden to cook, I know I should never use herbs if I had to walk half a mile to collect them.
I grow mine a step from the back door. There was room for a small bed behind the hedge we put in to screen the shameful back premises and Walter agreed with me that this was the place for our herbs. But I grow there only the everyday ones that are used regularly. It is fun to collect herbs but really you can count on the fingers of one hand those that are in constant use.
Parsley, of course, is the first that comes to mind, and it obligingly seeds itself sufficiently for me to find a few new plants to put in when the old ones get too aged. Tarragon I wouldn’t be without, the true French tarragon, which can be steeped in wine vinegar for the winter, and is used fresh on steak and to garnish eggs in aspic. Pennyroyal, marjoram and winter savory are collected with parsley for that neat little bunch, a
bouquet garni
, that makes all the difference to oxtail or veal. Chives are in constant demand for cooking with any dish that likes a touch of onion, or chopping over salad, mashed potatoes or cocktail snacks. I used to grow horseradish but it took possession of the bed, and there was no roast beef anyway when we came to live here, so officially it is banished, although it continues to make an occasional apologetic appearance. I grow two kinds of mint, the large-leaved flannel mint for cooking with peas and new potatoes, and ordinary mint for sauce and jelly.
Herbs are most delectable in a savoury butter, to be served with grilled meat or fish, or as a sandwich spread. Being a slapdash cook I choose the quickest way to make it, and that is to cut young sprigs of parsley, some chives and a few leaves of tarragon, and after washing and drying them hold the bunch tightly in my left hand while I cut them very finely with the kitchen scissors on to the butter. After adding a few drops of anchovy essence the whole is blended with a palette knife. To serve with meat or fish the butter is made into pats, which are kept in the refrigerator until wanted.
Caraway is another plant that I allow in the herb garden. It looks like a refined cow parsley, and is a biennial, but one that seeds itself very easily. Seed cake made with the green seeds is sheer ambrosia, if you happen to like seed cake. Any seeds that have escaped this fate are harvested and stored for winter use.
Most of the other herbs are too decorative to hide behind the hedge.
Rue, with its sharp pungency, must have been popular as a ‘strewing herb’ in the Elizabethan days, but it really has too definite a flavour for cooking. It is, however, one of the loveliest foliage plants and is a welcome addition to any border.
R.
Jackman’s Blue is the best form, with its bushy growth and very blue leaves. The pale yellow flowers are quite pleasant, used with the leaves with more distinct yellow flowers. Variegated rue is pleasantly delicate in tone and makes a lovely splash of light in a dark corner.
There are so many salvias that are good border plants that it is difficult to choose among them, but I think
S. Turkestanica
is my favourite. It is such a lovely and dignified plant with its pastel flowers of pink and mauve and its great soft leaves. It is a biennial and produces innumerable progeny every year. But to ensure a succession of plants each year one really needs to start off with two generations, a niece and an aunt, because this salvia usually takes two years to get big enough to flower.
S. virgata nemerosa (superba)
has something of the same charm as
S. Turkestanica
, because after the flowers are over the purple flower stems and bracts remain to give colour for a long time.
S. haematodes
has a pleasant loose growth, and makes a good show if it is tied up rather gently before it is too big.
S. argentea
is one of the handsomest of the silver tribe, but it does not care for too much rain on its thick felted leaves and is happier if you can find a corner for it where it can grow vertically, which is not too easy with such a big person. The green culinary sage is such a good evergreen that it should be planted where a hump of foliage is needed, and for this there is a good variety with a purple flower. Good for foliage too is the purple-leaved variety, and the purple variegated with white and pink. To bring sunlight into the scheme there is a soft green sage variegated with gold.