SOME TALK ABOUT WILD GARDENS. 



49 



with tender exotics, and with conceits in clipped and sculptured trees, 

 with bare soil surfaces, and with obtrusive artificial supports, whether for 

 climber or for herbaceous plant. 



" Fill your gardens with the wood and brake flora of the whole northern 

 world, with the Alpines which cushion under the snow in whatever 

 latitude winter snow may be found. Fill your woodlands with bluebells 

 of all colours, if they be not full already, with foxgloves, and anemones 

 and brambles, and daffodils, and forget-me-nots and primroses, with 

 night-blooming Oenotheras and what-not, in quantity and mass, as if the 

 hand of man had not planted them there. Drape your hedgerows and 

 your dead trees and your coverts with clematis, and honeysuckles, and 

 peaflowers, and vines, and bind-weeds, and single roses. Plant and sow 

 your walls w^ith linarias, and antirrhinums, and erinus, and harebells, and 

 saxifrages and ferns, and all else that will naturally grow there. Cover 

 your bare banks with natural tangles and with falling creepers, and the 

 banks of your ponds and streams with iris and marsh marigold and 

 water-dock and loose-strife, and your meadows and the skirts of your 

 woodlands with daffodils and colchicums. 



" And when you have finished the natural planting of the spaces without 

 the garden proper, and finally enter it, set yourself so to lay out and to 

 plant it that it may blend insensibly with surrounding nature. Let its 

 borders be, or be made, only natural in outline, their surfaces wholly filled, 

 even crowded, as in nature, with carpeting vegetation, and let their nobler 

 occupants be naturally grouped, naturally set, for contrast or'for harmony." 



That, or something like that, is the teaching of the natural school of 

 gardening, so far as essential to my present purpose. I readily yield my 

 own assent to it "in the broad," although circumstances of many kinds 

 prevent most of us from acting up to this ideal in all our gardening 

 operations. For the bit of formal bedding, or the hard line of path or 

 border still often lingers, even in the garden of the faithful, long after 

 his conversion. Such inconsistencies are generally remnants of old times, 

 left, like much else in our lives, not because we like them or think well 

 of them, but as concessions to that past from which we break but slowly, 

 to the conservatism of Madame, or may be of an old time " gardener. 



And of the general teaching of this "natural school " in gardening, 

 wild gardening on the lines which I have outlined is perhaps the most 

 essential and most characteristic feature. 



A recent and very competent writer in the Garden newspaper, 

 advising a correspondent upon the planting as a wild garden of a " thin 

 eight acre wood " in Cornwall, counsels the using of a very limited num- 

 ber of kinds of Conifers, and to " keep the main sheltering growth as 

 simple as possible " ; and expresses preference for this purpose for English 

 Yew and green Holly, Pinus insignis and Citpressus macrocarpa. 



According to this writer, the original meaning of wild gardening is 

 " to enrich places of wild growth with such exotic plants as may thrive 

 and look right in character, using for preference native trees and bushes 

 in large numbers of the same kinds, and grouping them, alone or in very 

 simple mixtures of not more than two or three kinds within view at one 

 glance." " If too many kinds are used, it will not be a wild garden at 



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