After I had made the terraced garden I had more walls to play with than I knew what to do with. I grew aubrieta from seed, all kinds of arabis, including the double variety and shades of pink and rose, also Arabis blepharophylla, which one so seldom sees, but which is an excellent wall plant with its tight rosettes of deep green leaves and stiff heads of magenta flowers. One plant of Dianthus caesius gave me innumerable cuttings, and all the rock campanulas were used ad infinitum. Saxifrages were stuffed into crannies, in some places I planted gypsophila to foam over the stones, in another Saponaria ocymoides. The trailing Geranium Traversii, Pritchard’s var., is good on a high wall, as it is generous with its trails, while Geranium sanguineum lancastiense can be used on top of a wall or in a rock crevice. Read the rest of this entry »

Our garden did not lend itself to a rock garden, as such, in fact I think very few gardens do. A rock garden, to be really convincing must look as if the stratas of rock were really part of the ground, and it must be on a big scale. At Forde Abbey, near Chard, a delightful rock garden winds up through high banks, with enormous rocks that look right. The rock gardens at Wisley, Kew and Edinburgh are equally generous, but unless one has a natural outcrop of rock or a very deep dell or very high bank which will accommodate really large lumps of rock, I think rock gardening should be done in less orthodox ways. There is nothing more depressing than a few stones rising self-consciously from a suburban lawn, which is almost as bad as those dreadful Victorian ‘rockeries’, which were nothing but a collection of horrible burrs or lumps of concrete huddled together in a shady, dank corner, where nothing but ferns would thrive. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »