Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life by Marta McDowell

Author:Marta McDowell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Timber Press
Published: 2013-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

Hill Top’s lilacs

The seeds of the annual flowers that Beatrix collected last fall can go into the ground. While she works, she is supervised by a robin, like the one she drew with Peter Rabbit’s shoe in the potato patch. It watches her with “bright little beady eyes, and a very red cap—no, not a cap, a red waistcoat,” waiting for her to turn the soil and expose fresh worms. It flutters away into a tree and keeps a lookout, warbling its song, twittering in alarm at the silent appearance of one of the cats.

By mid to late May, the black buds of the lilacs open with their lush panicles of bloom and heady aroma. Their heart-shaped leaves precede the blooms, adding a green underpinning. Lilacs are long-lived plants, and one antique shrub works its roots under the parlor floor at Hill Top, lifting up the floorboards. To keep the lilacs a manageable height, where the blooms can be enjoyed by those smaller in stature than Mr. Heelis, Beatrix prunes them as soon as the bloom is over, taking out the oldest branch or two every year to encourage new, shorter growth. Some she leaves tall, draping luxuriously over the wall of the kitchen garden in the front of Hill Top.

Azaleas, the deciduous variety, bloom in the shade of her lilacs, in pinks and yellows and—heavens!—even orange. They are showier than the smaller evergreen hybrids that are typical in gardens today, as the blooms are larger and open on bare branches ahead of the leaves. And they are wonderfully fragrant. Happy in Hill Top’s acidic soil, azaleas, and their evergreen cousins, the rhododendrons, are among the first shrubs that Beatrix mentions planting in her garden.

The ferns near the rockery unfurl their croziers. The little alpine plants have a better chance in the protected crevices she has created in the corner near the farm gate. Sea thrift, with flowers small, round, and pink, nods in the breeze agreeably. The gentians and tiny saxifrages, the rock plants and succulents can send their roots down undisturbed. In the larger garden beds, the hardy perennials would crowd out the alpines. Sometimes she grows little plants in an old stone horse trough; now that they have fewer horses and more motors, the troughs might as well be put to an alternate good use.

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