We Made a Garden by Margery Fish

Author:Margery Fish [Fish, Margery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849940504
Publisher: Pavilion Books Company Limited
Published: 2011-12-09T15:39:26+00:00

13. Some Failures

As a gardener I was a great trial to my husband and I marvel now that he was so patient with me. He wanted me to concentrate on the straightforward things like delphiniums and lupins instead of odd things which he thought were not so rewarding. He had little interest in small, unshowy plants that I liked to try, and liked a good return for his money. The only way I could get round this was to keep up the fiction that I did not buy plants and anything new that appeared in the garden had been given to me. It wasn’t that he minded the cost, but he took the line that as I did not look after properly the plants that I had (i.e. didn’t water the dahlias enough) it was silly to keep getting more plants.

Every gardener knows the fascination of the unknown, and when the ordinary plants are doing nicely there is a great temptation to be a little more venturesome. That is one of the excitements of gardening, but one which my husband did not share. He pretended not to see me with my nose in catalogues night after night, and though I always tried to intercept the postman when I was expecting plants, he always knew.

On the whole I agreed with him that it was silly to try to make things grow that obviously don’t like you, certainly not if your soil is wrong for them. But there are some plants that are naturally capricious and unpredictable and it becomes a personal challenge to succeed with them. One such plant is Scotch creeper, or Tropaeolum speciosum, to give it its proper name. I knew it could be grown in this part of the world because for several of my friends it ramped away without restraint. But it just wouldn’t grow for me, though I tried it in a dozen different places, giving it everything I thought it liked. I planted it on the north side of walls and hedges, so that it could worm its way to the sun, and took endless trouble digging large holes for its reception, and filling them with a mixture of good soil and peat. Sometimes it put its head out to see if it liked the world, decided it didn’t and settled down to sulk. Very often it didn’t bother to send up a single leaf. Only once did it respond to my overtures but, alas, it had the temerity to choose for its support one of Walter’s cherished rambler roses, and the moment when it was ready to open its vivid scarlet blossoms coincided with Walter’s decision to cut down the rose, and my creeper went with it. Though I continue to struggle never again have I had so much co-operation. There are two places where it comes up most years, although sometimes it will quite happily miss a year or two. It does some times achieve a few very meagre flowers at the end of the season, but obviously has no heart in it.

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