CHAPTER NINE Shrubs The word Shrub comes from the Old English scrybb, related to the Low German shrubben meaning coarse, uneven. Forget these ungracious connotations. Shrubs make for a varied border in their own right, and can demarcate spaces, leading to places not initially seen. All below, except the golden choisya, will grow in sun or shade, by which I mean they are best sited where in summer they get a splash of sun for an hour or more. Shrubs make for a varied border in their own right. Some shrubs like weigela, lilac,...
> MORECHAPTER EIGHT Leaves and Trees Leaves Plant catalogues would have it otherwise, but leaves are often more important than flowers. They last an entire season, and there’s no need to dead head. Varied leaves can give an impression of intrigue, creating a lively party you want to join. This comes from mingling and contrast such as ferny leaves beside solid leaves, feathery leaves and lacy leaves, matt and shining leaves, and...
> MOREPART TWO CHAPTER SEVEN Practicalities Attitude Relax. Let go, be tolerant, accept the odd holes in a hosta leaf, a few misshapen flowers. If the hosta is destroyed by slugs, grow another in a tub where they can’t reach it, or grow something else. Don’t use words like plague, infestation, pests, horror, nuisance, don’t treat your garden as a battlefield...
> MORECHAPTER SIX Downsides of Gardening If you don’t employ a gardener, your garden necessitates continuous toil. Winter may provide a brief and welcome break, but there’s no such thing as sustainable gardening. A truly sustainable garden which did its own thing would have little but ground elder, brambles and bindweed. Even the plantless gravel gardens of Japan require constant raking and the removal of weeds which appear (where...
> MORECHAPTER FIVE The Seasons Winter Gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society * stay open throughout the year, but most gardens open to the public close from September to Easter. We only see them in their party best. Our own gardens are the only ones we regularly see in a state of continuous change, for worse and better. In early November birch leaves still hang, like gold coins when the sun is low, and silvery when...
> MORECHAPTER FOUR About Trees Every garden, no matter how small, needs some verticality to break the flatness of two dimensions, and ideally this is a tree. What is it about trees? We relate because we both stand upright, with a trunk supporting our head and limbs. We identify. We can embrace them and feel reciprocal pleasure. The aura of any place, its atmosphere, may be personified in goblins, angels, elves and demons. More visibly, it is felt in the long silent being of trees. The older a tree, the greater its...
> MORECHAPTER THREE The Others Birds Birds are free as we can never be. They soar the sky. They blithely cross garden fences, barbed wire, prison walls, national borders and oceans. We need birds to remind us of a liberty which, except in the mind, we have never had. We need the dawn chorus in spring, the jabber of jackdaws, the whole orchestra of the garden. I write this having just returned from Egypt, where on ancient temples and inside tombs all manner of birds are painted and sculpted. They are mostly gods. Horus a sky god is a...
> MORE3. CHAPTER TWO Awareness The Sky ‘The sky is sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together, almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, it reflects what is immortal in us’ wrote John Ruskin. * I would take away the ‘almost’. Victor Hugo wrote, ‘There is one spectacle grander than the sea, and that is the sky. Look up anywhere any day from any garden, and you see the sky, usually with clouds. Storm clouds,...
> MOREDue to the pandemic, poor old Chelsea Flower Show was switched from its usual May to late September. Dull! All these show gardens in drab greens, as though sprayed with a wash of grey, plus the usual unrealistic plashing waterfall here and there. Why not a flaming forest of dahlias? Better I thought were the balcony gardens, where you would lounge in your eyrie way above the crowds. Also I liked the container gardens which could travel with your every change of house – pots, tins, barrels and the like painted and planted with...
> MOREHappiness? Health? The concept of happiness as a steady achievable state of being is comparatively modern (look at those meek medieval madonnas, dour Dutch citizens, proud Renaissance magnates,). Aristotle understood the search for happiness but later it was neither particularly sought or admired, particularly by religions, which state that suffering is humanity’s daily fare. Then came the eighteenth century and the US declaration that all men have a right to the pursuit of happiness, and Alexander Pope declaring ‘Oh Happiness, our...
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