The Education of a Gardener by Russell Page

Author:Russell Page
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407092041
Publisher: Harvill Press

CHAPTER VII

On planting: flowers

Garden lovers anywhere are certain to associate English gardens with herbaceous borders. They will imagine an improbably green lawn with a mixed border on either side with every plant in flower simultaneously from one end to the other. The mixed border of herbaceous plants has indeed dominated the British garden for the last seventy years. In its beginnings it was a device to show the beauty of hardy flowers as the alternative to a current passion for bedding out half-hardy annuals. An artist like Gertrude Jckyll made flower borders which were lovely by any count just because she was an artist and whatever she touched bore her stamp as such. She and others, professionals or amateurs, designed gardens in which flower borders were the main feature, and within a generation this new and aristocratic horticultural fashion had spread to every middle-class garden. Nurserymen have been printing plans for long-flowering mixed borders on the back page of their catalogues for some years now and herbaceous gardening in England has become a popular amusement.

But even from the early days of herbaceous borders discriminating gardeners sought to modify what was becoming a commonplace and started composing in a range of one colour—blue, perhaps, or yellow or white—in an effort to find a new formula for using hardy plants.

To-day in England high garden fashion has veered towards other forms of gardening, but in France and Italy and Switzerland people ask for an English garden; when one asks them how they envisage an English garden the answer is always that they want grass right up to the house and a mixed flower border. Except near the sea or in the mountains or where the air is especially moist, herbaceous borders are not a success on the Continent. For their somewhat disillusioned owners they are not bright enough for long enough, and continental gardeners will not learn their proper cultivation. The admittedly difficult problem of staking is solved by a piece of string tied so tightly that it throttles and deforms the plant, and then, in despair, annual flowers are planted in the bare spaces which grow larger year by year.

I must have seen thousands of herbaceous borders and I know I have planned and planted hundreds, though not always with pleasure. A border is often too narrow for one to plant it in depth; and herbaceous plants should have breadth of treatment since they are basically meadow flowers which should by their arrangement recall their native haunts. Then, in the best case, where you may have a fifteen or twenty-foot-wide border, this extensive and brightly flowered hay (for that is what many herbaceous plants quite simply are) has neither body nor character enough to make broad planting look other than flimsy. These are my reasons for disliking the classic herbaceous border in general, although I have and shall continue to make exceptions. Norah Lindsay, so typical of the English lady who gardens, even her hats an offering of fruit or flowers, had a special talent for handling gardens of herbaceous plants.

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