Gardens
Reach for the sky
Ursula Buchan
There is a widespread, wrong, assump- tion that small gardens require (perhaps even deserve) only small plants. Small trees with small leaves, dwarf shrubs with even smaller flowers, anything with 'corn- pacta' after its name, rock and alpine plants — these are the fit occupants of a small garden. The supposition is that a sense of scale requires that height should hardly equal, let alone surpass, width, with the result that gardens become simply low, mounded humps of billowing foliage. Is there not, however, the whole of God's heaven above us, rather than just a few paltry feet? Certainly some children im- agine that, if they eat their greens, they will one day bump their heads against the sky, but it is not a belief usually carried into adult life.
The results of the fallacy are most obvious in July. The small garden, by which I mean one under 1/4-acre in area (although that is open to debate), will be a low mass of geraniums, alpine campanulas, pinks and half-hardy annuals: various in colour, but unemphatic, even dull, because it lacks contrast of form. Yet in July, spired and spiked plants are everywhere flower- ing (if given the chance) and hardly any are uncommon enough to confound the garden-centre shopper.
Delphiniums make enormous impact without taking up half the border. Unless monsters are wanted for exhibition at flower shows, the Pacific Hybrids, which grow to six feet high, can be planted as close as 18 inches apart. The uncharitably named Goat's Beard, Aruncus sylvester, has creamy-white pyramids of flowers on five-foot wiry stems at the same time as the delphiniums and is a fit companion for them. The commendably easy relation of the lily, Asphodeline lutea, with tufted leaves and yellow, fragrant spikes up to four feet tall, would look well in front of such a combination. A little later, the white candles of Galtonia candicans could accompany the asphodeline's flowers. I hesitate to call any plant majestic, but the Fox Tail Lily, Eremurus 'Shelford Hyb- rids', with narrow columns of star-shaped yellow, pink, or orange flowers rising seven feet above a sunny border, earns the epithet more than most.
Red-hot pokers are an acquired taste, which many of us do not feel quite strong enough to acquire, particularly those with disagreeable red-and-orange rounded spikes of flowers and gross leafage which languishes soggily after hard frosts, like the forsaken heroine of a romantic novel. But a clump of one of the smaller-headed one-colour varieties, such as the two-foot high, pale yellow 'Little Maid', will relieve the unremitting monotony of catmint and Lamb's Ears in a sunny place.
The woolly-leaved mullein, Verbascum thapsus, can look shockingly coarse in a well-ordered border, having large, untidy leaves and a stem of flowers which refuse to open all at the same time, but the Cotswold hybrids are neater and the deep- pink-flowered 'Domino' is neither very tall nor brash. Even the despised foxglove looks well, if allowed to seed (to some extent) amongst the Old Roses.
There are plants which must be treated circumspectly, of course. Both the Scots Thistle (Onopordon) and the Globe This- tle appear too massive and substantial even if, in reality, they do not take up more than three feet of border space. The same is true, regretfully, of Macleya cordata; its creamy-pink plumes and large-lobed bronzy leaves lend height and dignity to the July border, but, like The Mousetrap, it will run and run.
Preferable are some of the more well- behaved grasses. I can do without the compact form of Pampas Grass, not wishing to cut my hands to shreds when weeding round it, but I do like the variety of Miscanthus sinensis called `Gracillimus', which makes a clump of grey-green, nar- row foliage from which rise feathery pani- cles in early autumn. This does well in a moist soil, as does one of my favourite grasses (available from Beth Chatio's Un- usual Plants) Deschampsia caespitosa `Goldschleier' (Gold Veil). This has an insignificant little tuft of leaves but, in July, it sends up four-foot stems of flowers, which gradually turn golden-yellow to- wards the end of summer. Because the effect is so light and airy, this plant would not look out of place in a window-box.
It may be the understandable emphasis on ground cover which is partly to blame for so much flat planting, for ground- hugging plants rarely lift their heads very far. However, paradoxically, the most effective ground-cover plants can spread too much in restricted space and too densely to provide good opportunities for planting taller things amongst them. Ivies and periwinkle are all very well in their way but they leave precious little room for anything else.
Of course, it would be mad to suggest planting large trees, for example, in a small garden, if only because shade is more difficult to manage than sun. But there seems no reason to fall under the tyranny imposed by the words 'small garden' and exclude all the taller herbaceous peren- nials. In the Rectory garden, it should not only be Our Padre's flagstaff which points to Higher Things.
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