Gardens
Doing the flowers
Ursula Buchan
Christmas is the, season of anxiety. In our house the vexed question of whether we think Father Christmas physically cap- able of carrying a bicycle down the chim- ney fades in significance in comparison with what I am to do about the church flowers.
For me, this issue resolves itself into two principal and almost intractable problems. The first is how to secure my vase safely to the very narrow, sloping sill below the side window which has been allotted to me. Some people worry about aeroplanes drop- ping out of the sky onto their heads; I worry about my vase coming loose from its moorings and toppling forward during Evensong, drenching Mrs S. who always sits next to the window. By coincidence she wears a hat the shape of an empty flowerpot, so there is a sense in which such a disaster might bring about some improve- ment. That catastrophe may never happen but even worse already has.
Unlike the altar, the four large side windows are only decorated for the great festivals of the Christian year. One May, confused by a bank holiday which had diverged from Whitsun (I beg your pardon, Pentecost) by the matter of a fortnight, I failed to remember to decorate 'my' win- dow. As I entered the church for the Sunday service, the blood almost froze in my veins. It was the kind of moment which, in old thriller films, warranted and received a crashing chord. Instead of an explosion of white lilac and red paeony, my window was as empty, as cold, and as dreary as Fulham Broadway underground station at midnight. Lacking the nerve to escape, I endured my shame for an hour's eternity. I strongly suspect that village history is now dated by that incident: `Wasn't that the Whitsun she forgot to do her window?' Of such stuff are nightmares made.
No less problematical than making a vase safe is what to put in it in this dead, dormant season. When I came to this garden I removed many of the unexciting shrubs and herbaceous perennials which inhabited it, on the grounds that everybody had them. / would grow more unusual and, therefore, interesting plants. So I wantonly destroyed Forsythia and Pyrethrum, chry- santhemums and Chinese lanterns, only to find I had to replace them (Interesting cultivars, of course') in order to find material at different times of the year for the church. I now see that they may well have bored my predecessor as well, but were there for a purpose. Most stupid of all, I dug up a holly, ostensibly because it irritated me to be pricked by dead leaves when I weeded around it, but more be- cause it was a drab, green, ordinary Ilex aquifolium in the wrong place. My unusual variegated form, which succeeded it, has grown eight inches in five years (which even in the context of slow-growing Ilex is an impressive score), so it will be a little while yet before I can raid it for cutting material.
A holly is plainly a necessity for winter flower-arranging. Or I should say two hollies for, with the brave exceptions of Ilex aquifolium `J.C. van Tol' and Pyrami- dalis', which are self-sufficient females, they need a companion of the opposite sex to bear fruit. If you want berries and interesting golden-edged green foliage grow 'Madame Briot' and 'Golden Queen' (which perversely is male) together. If red berries seem too commonplace, grow the two variants of the common holly 'Amber' (orange) or `Bacciflava' (yellow). I favour `J.C. van Tol', where there is room or inclination for only one holly,) because it has masses of proper Christmas- sy red berries, is self-fertile and (what really recommends it to me) has no leaf- prickles. Do not expect any of them to grow very fast. You must guard hol- lyberries jealously from the birds in De- cember which means that, as it is unlikely you will have room for great sprays of holly in the freezer, you will have to net at least part of your tree.
Of course, one need not confine onself to hollies to provide berrying material. Cotoneaster x rothschildianus is a large, semi-evergreen shrub which retains its many yellow berries until late on in winter, Crataegus x prunifolia clings on to its red berries, and two pyracanthas, P. angustifo- and x watereri retain theirs although, being pyracanthas, they cannot be wholly perfect — these have a weakness for scab. You will feel some compulsion to put ivy with your holly, no doubt. Hedera `Gloire de Marengo' has an irregular silvery edging, `Dentata Aurea' has creamy- yellow margins but, if the appetite sickens of a surfeit of variegations, 'Caen- woodiana' has dark green leaves and a stiff, upright habit. This last fact should commend it to the attention of those of us with no pretensions to expertise in 'floral art'.
I should be surprised if I were alone in finding church decoration anxious; it is such a widespread preoccupation. In our small village, there are only 25 regular church-goers (male and female) but more than 50 names on the flower rota; a vivid illustration of the fact that people will do almost anything for their church except attend its services. I wonder if those great minds which have grappled with the ques- tion 'Whither the Church of England?' have considered this curious paradox. Has Anglicanism been reduced to an affililated branch (Spiritual Section) of the National Association of Flower Arrangement Societies, or is church decoration an act of worship in itself? God knows.
Previous page
