Seaside Gardens

Southland Times, Issue 21220, 22 October 1930, Page 13

Seaside Gardens

London.

A Hollywood visitor to London recently expressed her enthusiastic delight in London’s little gardens. “Even quite little houses,” she said, “have their tiny gardens, and. they're all so beautifully kept.”

What, would be her comments on some of our seashore gardens, I wonder, could she tour our coasts? I am thinking, not of those lovely gardens of the West Countrie, that have been cultivated for centuries in the villages which nestle in the coves of Devon, Cornwall and Somerset, nor yet of many, which brave the winds, high up on many a sea-grit shore, sheltered by wellplanned windbreaks of hurdle, within ■which rise walls of Austrian or Japanese pine, Douglas spruce, wych elm, euonymus japonicus, and sea buckthorn. Nor yet of /the exposed and windblown stretches of East Anglia, where hawthorn hedge-and hornbeam, privet and myrobella plum shut out the fury of east wind that keeps bleak and barren the seaward side, and enclose, many a lovely flowering garden behind their walls.

I am thinking of the newer and only just established little gardens that flaunt their finery of summer blooms wherever new bungalow towns begin to grow and duster here and there, and everywhere along our shore line. Go where wo will, we English, it would seem that we must take our gardens with us, even if it is only for a few short summer months that we can enjoy them. Be conditions as hostile as they "may to the success of our plantings, yet somehow we manage to overcome all the difficulties in the way. There is a very new bungalow colony I have in mind, right on the edge of a shingly shore, where you might have thought it almost impossible to make flowers grow. A year or two ago it looked gaunt and bare. To-day, tamarisk hedges , are springing up magically around it. The lovely yellow sea-poppies, with their silverygrey foliage, have been transplanted and lovingly coaxed into clustering round the little gateways which lead straight out on to bathing beach.

Many of the enterprising owners have built up flower beds by having enough soil carted out to make a foot or two of depth above the sand and shingle bottom, and to plant therein the hardier climbing roses, sweet peas, marigolds, zinnias, asters, and all the varieties of poppies. Another fashion, and a very charming one, which has done much to beautify the bare arid-spaces that surround newly erected shore bungalows, is that of the tub garden. It suits those people who can only afford to spend a very small portion of their time upon their seaside garden. It produces charmingly decorative results with a minimum of gardening labour and little expense. A dozen or more good deep wide tubs (halved butter tubs are excellent for the purpose) are painted and varnished blue, black, green, yellow, red, or brown, according to a planned colour scheme, and they are set carelessly or formally about the place as the owners will dictates. I saw one colourful scheme in which two tubs in the centre of the garden space flaunted a mass of scarlet sweet williams. Along the verandah porch, emerging from two' more tubs placed on either side of the wooden steps leading to the porch, trailed canary' creeper, a bloom, with yellow blossoms and yellow and red nasturtiums rioting along a. narrow trellis, projecting below the verandah, roof. Around the rest of the shingle plot were set haphazard another half-dozen tubs, two ablaze with marigolds, two in which the orange Japanese wallflowers in their full glory shimmered in the sun, and two brimmed over with flamecoloured snapdragons, while here and there about the shingle ever-spreading patches of yellow saxifrage nestled upon green lacy carpets of leaves. The paint on the bungalow was a rich creamy hue, the window curtains and the colour of the tubs matched the silver-wash-ed tint of the sea poppies’ foliage. The whole was a harmony of green and yellow, with vivid red splashes against a background of cloud-fleckcd windy sky and a grey-green sea.