When it came to staking I came to grief badly. In the first place I did not stake early enough, and quite a lot of handsome heads of flowers were condemned by my mentor because they were crooked by the time I did tie them up. Nothing will straighten a plant that has grown crooked. And when I did stake I was accused of doing it too loosely. My idea was to allow the plants to grow as naturally as I could so I put a few sticks at the outside of each clump and tied string— not too tightly—to the sticks. I admit it wasn’t satisfactory because the wind blew the flowers about mercilessly in my little enclosures and they got tangled and bent. I was warned that I must be more drastic but took no heed. So Walter taught me a lesson. He got stout stakes (mine were slight because I didn’t want them to show too much) and he drove them into the ground with a mallet. Read the rest of this entry »

It took nearly a year to get rid of the pole roses in my terraced garden. We let the house in September 1939 and went to London. Walter became Press Adviser to the Censor and I went with him as his secretary, so it was June 1940 before we saw our garden again.

I think it came as much as a shock to Walter as it did to me. Our tenants were busy on war work and looking after a family in war time. They had done the essentials, such as grass cutting, but the flower garden had received no check or restraint, and it had turned itself into a tropical jungle. The roses had forgotten they were meant to climb up poles, and had sent out long clutching feelers in every direction. An attractive, but particularly invasive, Michaelmas daisy had taken complete control of the garden. This Michaelmas daisy is deceptive. Above ground its fine feathery white flowers are just the foil for stiff flowers such as zinnias and dahlias, but underground its roots run hither and yon like ants from an ant heap. Read the rest of this entry »

When we bought the house our boundary, the ditch, was always full of water, and we bought the strip of the next orchard with the idea of making a wild garden, with water running through it. The banks on both sides were to be tamed and planted, leaving the willows just as they had been when the ditch was purely utilitarian. But again we were disappointed, because as soon as we had widened the bottom of the ditch, and had put down flat stones to make pools and waterfalls, the water disappeared. We never discovered why, because both orchards drained into the ditch, and there is never any shortage of rain in this part of the world. We could only think a new and deeper well had been dug somewhere in the neighbourhood, but gone it had, and now the only time there is water in the ditch is after unusually heavy rain. Read the rest of this entry »

Watering was another garden job on which Walter had very strong views. Nothing annoyed him more than to hear that overworked bromide ‘You can’t start watering unless you go on doing it every day. His theory was that people who have to go on doing it every day don’t water properly. They give a pleasant little sprinkle which damps the ground and makes it smell delicious, without even beginning to get down to the roots of the plants, in fact it tempts the roots to come up to the surface to get a drink, and they get burnt up unless that little sprinkle is repeated every day. If you scratch the ground after a so-called watering you will usually find that the water has hardly penetrated below the surface.

Walter’s way of watering was thorough in the extreme. He had lengths of hose with which he could reach every part of the garden, and it took him several days to do the job as he thought it should be done. This, of course, was in the days when one was allowed to use a hose and there was no restriction on watering from main supply. Read the rest of this entry »

I continued planting daffodils under the apple trees, acquiring cheap lots when I could, and lifting and dividing those already there. They were a great joy, because- daffodils undoubtedly look their best tossing their heads in long grass, but in the end they had to go too. We were faced with the problem of cutting the grass and there again the problem of labour defeated us. We had an Allen scythe, but no one to use it. We begged local farmers to help by cutting it with their big mowing machines in return for the hay, but the orchard had been used for chickens and was so uneven that the blades of the mowing machines were badly damaged. The sensible thing was to wire the orchard and let it for grazing, and that we did. Cows don’t eat daffodils unless there is nothing else for them, butthey trample them in a heartbreaking way, so that half the buds never had a chance to open. There was nothing else for it but to dig them up and plant them in other parts of the garden. Even if we could have solved the cutting problem and let the grass go for hay it wouldn’t have worked. If you take away all the grass you must in fairness give your trees some nourishment in place of it, and the natural way to do this is to offer your hospitality to cows or sheep, who will keep down the grass and leave thank offerings behind. Read the rest of this entry »

In our endeavours to make the garden more interesting we made every mistake that was possible, and I hate to think of all the hours of work I have put in undoing the result of our labours.

Very early in the game we decided we must develop vistas in the garden to add interest and purpose. In a small garden it is difficult to achieve the unexpected. A big garden gives ample scope with hedges, walls, varying levels and the size of the garden itself. We all know gardens that never achieve character, however much work the owners put into them. We wanted our garden to be ‘come hitherish’, for just as in a house one should catch a glimpse of something exciting that makes you want to explore further, so a garden should lead you on from one point to another. You mustn’t see it all at once, but there must be glimpses that make you wonder what is round the corner. Read the rest of this entry »