FAREWELL TO GARDENS

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21198, 23 June 1934, Page 15

FAREWELL TO GARDENS

* (SPECIALLY WRITTEN roil THE PRESS.) [By QUENTIN POPE.] There is little growth in the grass; the last leaves of the chestnuts are huddled in the long beds by the brick path; the hydrangea hedge, scarred by its ' foe the frost, is wilting into brown surrender, and the dahlias, rearguard of the summer, which flaunted their beauty along the southern wall, have gone down to destruction. It is the moment when gardeners should pause and take stock of the beauty of the past season, when actually what they do is to plan eagerly for the following year. It is "next year" that I expect that new shrubbery, assembled with what patience and searching of heart and of catalogues, to begin to astonish the world with blossom. And next, year it will be "next year" that I anticipate owning a sunken garden at the bottom of the terrace outside my study, a garden when there shall be a lily pool with goldfish and where we shall grow bearded irises. There is something of the never-ending quest of all mankind in this challenge to the future issued by gardeners, this defying of all slugs and insects yet unborn, this discounting of all the benefits of the present for some future hour of sunshine. Yes, they agree, the chrysanthemums were splendid this season—splendid, but next year. . . . Our Unexciting Spring

In this country the spring has little significance. The native s'hrubs assume their new leaves with only slight changes of green, their flowers are shy, there is no splendour in their burgeoning. In the older world the spring means a real spiritual awakening and the pulse of humanity, enfranchised from a time of ice and snow, bounds up a beat. The return of the sun means something after the cutting winds of an English winter. To us it signifies not much more than a change in our sports. Unless we live in a spot such as the old garden outside my house, where the chestnuts, the silver birches, the cherries, and the apples, losing their summer kirtles stand up bare and complaining, the cycle of the season cannot come home to us, for there is nothing so exciting in nature as the first buds of a tree unfolding. The average gardener sees winter not as a barren, flowerless time, but a breathing space in which he feverishly works at the ground in order to prepare it for next summer's demands. And, as manual labour of that sort is repugnant to most men unless they have some definite pian in mind, he plans with keen desire.

It is at moments such as these that the expert gardener is to be feared. For him the running of a garden is no mere pleasure to be savoured with wonder and delight when, in spite of all we have done to deter them, the plants grow to noble proportions and dazzling colour. For the expert the garden is a business. You manure, mulch, weed, water, improve. And when the winter comes down upon you and you plan to alter the lay-out of the garden, to add a shrubbery maybe, to grow your own berries, to make a patch of woodland in a shady corner, the expert is ever at your heels with his talcs of what to do to the land in order that it may be at its best next year. He does not realise, it seems, that it is the constructing which, in spite of dirt and wet and perspiration, is the fun. There is real achievement in a completed rustic fence, an archway, a bed rescued from robber roots. And similarly there is an adventure in the garden run a little wild which no expert ever achieves. That delphinium, thrusting its flowery crest up from the midst of a fence covered by rambler roses, would never have reached the spot in any well-kept garden run by the clock, I feel sure; nor would that other rose, tiring of the stump which it is supposed to embrace, have been permitted to begin climbing along the boughs of the pussy willows in the hedge. Yet these are things which give the garden character, which make it different from other gardens. Down With Dog-Latin!

Again the expert makes his menacing presence felt in the names of flowers. "Common names," said a seedsman to me this year, "are a great nuisance." But who would surrender to this semi-scientific trend of the times long enough to allow aquilegia to replace the name columbine, to surrender to antirrhinum when they may still use the name (so dear to childhood) of snapdragon? Who wants blue Marguei-ite to hide her head under the style of agathaea? These names are bad enough, but there are others which are a positive insult. To us the honeysuckle can never be"lonicera;" it would be like turning round on our best friend and addressing him as "Mister." And to call the golden rod "solidago" is like calling a Christmas cake a pudding. There is a rare duality about the old English flower names, whether we know them or not: the clove pink, with its wonderful title of sops-in-the-wine. the butterfly-flower, so poorly disguised under the horrible name schizanthus, cherry pie, instead of the formalism of heliotropium, and such old favourites as love-in-a-mist, morning glory, traveller's joy, heartsease, eyebright, bachelor's buttons, good King Henry, and Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon. There are in these names a flavour and colour and heart-warming qualities which should never be scrapped for any dog-Latin.

Surprising Delights If we are not of the stern stuff of those who raise flowers in winter and shame their neighbours, this coming of the cold season is a time for forgetting the severely practical gardener, whose talk is all of fiveinch blooms and the right methods of preparing liquid manure, and pondering on our treasures of the last season. In my garden I remember the treasure we discovered when we cut through a buddleia and discovered in its thick shade a japonica (pyrus japonicus) which had somehow managed to thrive and flower, though not to fruit, in the native jungle. I remember the baby lacebark which made its brave app'earance, right in the midst of a lupin clump, miles from its nearest fellow, borne by some bird to its home in our friendly soil. There was the dahlia clump which had spread and multiplied in an odd corner for years, had pushed its fat tubers into the earth for two feet, and then, finding strength to excavate lacking, had pushed up the earth about it with a fervour of multiplication, till the ground was like a miniature mountain. There was the tiger-lily, which sprang into the air from behind the michaelmas daisy clump, an exotic, scented, graceful beauty, like some strange creature from old Mexico. And in