Cottage Garden Flowers by Margery Fish

Author:Margery Fish [Fish, Margery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-84994-107-5
Publisher: Pavilion Books
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

~ 12 ~

The Summer Beauties

There are certain flowers that one always associates with the thatch and warm brick of an old cottage. Hollyhocks are one of them, in white or pink or red, and many shades in between, double or single. There used to be hollyhocks with variegated leaves but I do not believe they exist today. In pictures of old cottages there are always hollyhocks, silhouetted against the old walls or standing sentinel beside the cottage door. They seed themselves most generously and there are always plenty coming on. In bigger gardens hollyhocks are often attacked by rust and have to be dug up and burnt, but the ones that grow in cottage gardens are usually more healthy.

Sunflowers (Helianthus annus), are also typical cottage flowers with their great round country faces, which always seem too big for any plant, and are quite out of proportion to the rest of the picture. Why sunflowers were so popular I have never known, unless they were grown for the seed. They are very easy, of course, and very accommodating in a tiny garden for they do their flowering way above the other garden inhabitants. You certainly get a lot for your money and there is something very rural about those great moon faces looking so haughtily over the high fence.

The May-flowering peonies were other prized plants and really they have much to recommend them. Modern peonies have flowers in many delicate shades and they are ravishingly beautiful but they do not last nearly as long as the various forms of P. officinalis. There is a cottage in the next village where great clumps of double red peonies grow on each side of the door, and those patches of glorious colour are there for all to enjoy for nearly a month. Nothing could look better against the mellowed stone of the old cottage. The popular name of this peony, P. officinalis rubra plena*, was Pianet. There are also white ones and pink ones, all sweetly scented. The ones we grow today are all doubles, and I do not know what has happened to the singles—white, pink and crimson—which are mentioned in old books. There used, also, to be one so dark that it was almost black and was called ‘La Negresse’. The double anemone-flowered peony was a rich crimson and had irregular petals. The old double white opens a flesh pink and becomes white as it ages and the double rose pales to a rich blush-pink.

Peonies are wonderful plants for labour-free gardens and although the greatest demand today is for Chinese peonies, the old European plants have come in for a little attention because of their stalwart habit and earlier flowering.

The old double day-lily, Hemerocallis fulva, was another favourite. It needed no attention and came up year after year, producing its daily offering of flowers for many weeks. It is a soft orange and blends happily with other flowers.

The tall blue spikes of Jacob’s ladder (Polemonium coeruleum) rise gracefully from attractive ferny foliage.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.