About fifteen sorts are used in this double border; very early and very
late ones are excluded, so as to have a good display from the third week
of September for a month onward. They are mostly in rather large groups
of one kind together.
There is a more than usual pleasure in such a Daisy garden, kept apart
and by itself; because the time of its best beauty is just the time when
the rest of the garden is looking tired and overworn--evidently dying
for the year. Some trees are already becoming bare of leaves; the tall
sunflowers look bedraggled; Dahlias have been pinched by frost and
battered by autumn gales, and it is impossible to keep up any pretence
of well-being in the borders of other hardy flowers.
Then with the eye full of the warm colouring of dying vegetation and the
few remaining blooms of perennial Helianthus and half-hardy marigolds of
the fading borders, to pass through some screening evergreens to the
fresh, clean, lively colouring of the lilac, purple and white Daisies,
is like a sudden change from decrepit age to the brightness of youth,
from the gloom of late autumn to the joy of full springtide.
Another excellent way of growing the perennial Asters is among shrubs,
and preferably among Rhododendrons, whose rich green forms a fine
background for their tender grace, and whose stiff branches give them
the support they need.
[Illustration: THE ALCOVE, ARLEY
FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF
MRS. CAMPBELL]
ARLEY
Throughout the length and breadth of England it would be hard to find
borders of hardy flowers handsomer or in any way better done than those
at Arley in Cheshire. The house, an old one, was much enlarged by the
late Mr. R. E. Egerton-Warburton, and the making of the gardens, now
come to their young maturity, was the happy work of many years of his
life. Here we see the spirit of the old Italian gardening, in no way
slavishly imitated, but wholesomely assimilated and sanely interpreted
to fit the needs of the best kind of English garden of the formal type,
as to its general plan and structure. It is easy to see in the picture
how happily mated are formality and freedom; the former in the garden’s
comfortable walls of living greenery with their own appropriate
ornaments, and the latter in the grandly grown borders of hardy flowers.
The subject of the picture is the main feature in the garden plan. A
path some fifteen feet wide, with grassy verges of ample width, and deep
borders of hardy flowers. What is shown is about one fourth of the whole
length. At the back of the right-hand border is the high old wall of the
kitchen garden; on the left, as grand a wall of yew, ten feet high and
five feet thick, its straight line pleasantly broken and varied by
shaped buttresses of clipped yew, whose forms take that distinct light
and shade, and strong variations of solidity of green colouring, that
make the surfaces of our clipped English yew so valuable a ground-work
for masses of brilliant flowers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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