'Gardening
Transience
Denis Wood
Among all the principles and qualities which go to make up garden design, unity, scale, variety, contrast and many others, transience may not always be apbreciated. It will occur irrespective of all our planning, but a conscious recognition of its value and significance will be useful, With Herrick we may weep to see the daffodils haste away so soon ye' even I, who love them above Other flowers„would be bored and come to hate them if they remained relentlessly in flower. through torrid summer days, November mists and iron frosts of winter.
I think a mistake is made by Prolonging unduly flowering ,periods beyond a natural term. ,too soon we become fatigued by oYbrid floribunda roses staring Nedly at us for six long months, and how miserable they look, long OUtstaying their welcome, standMg sodden on leafless branches almost up to Christmas. The older roses, gallicas and damasks, are so Much better mannered, knowing When to take their leave; and those scarlet geraniums which looked so gay and fresh when first 1)14t in for Summer Eights, ComMem. Balls and the first days of the London Season, look garish lOng before the end of summer, and how glad we are to see them go at the first bite of frost.
But it is the truly perpetual Vowers which are the most hateful. The old malmaison carnations, loose and romantic, were one thing, but the present bottomless reservoir for funeral Wreaths is intolerable. Much Worse are chrysanthemums; if cHtlY they could have been left
with their large heads of bronze and yellow, and their sharp astringent smell in October and November, we could have still appreciated them for their true purpose, autumn flowers. I think the ultimate disaster would occur if somebody invented all-the-yearround dahlias, the most loathed of all flowers.
Much of the charm and beauty and tenderness in our gardens comes from the transient things; the first snowdrops and aconites, the first daffodil spears, all instinct with promise which has no significance without fulfilment and decline; primroses, Housman's Lent Lily "that dies on Easter Day," all ,the blossoms of the spring, pear and cherry and apple — and lilac, as fugitive as first' , love before it hurries away like the torrents of Spring. Fallen blosi som on the grass (the only excuse for that egregiously dreadful cher ry, Kanzan, previously and wrongly known as Hisakura, beloved of park directors, is the mauve-pink carpet which it spreads on the grass when its blossoms mercifully fall). Dead leaves also, making shifting pat terns of bronze and gold along the windy avenues. Moving shadows on the grass. Who now remembers the Minstrel's song from 'The Immortal Hour '?
I have seen all things pass and all men go Under the shadow of the drifting leaf: Green leaf, red leaf, brown leaf, Grey leaf blown to and fro: Blown to and fro.
I have seen happy dreams rise up and pass Silent and swift as shadows on the grass: Grey shadows of old dreams, Grey beauty of old dreams, Grey shadows in the grass.
There is in most of us a tension, an ambivalence which troubles the mind; on the one hand something which is irrationally against all human experience, a longing for stability, for an abiding city which endures in an uncertain changing world, on the other in at least equal measure, a restless craving for change, an inescapable unfaithfulness, These irreconcilables are some of the lacrimae rerum, resolved only in memory which can call back briefly, at will or by infallible and instantaneous association, the Quadriga on St Mark's, blossom of a Paulownia tree leaning over a wall at Avignon, or a first tumultuous awareness at a meeting of eyes. And still, years later,
The lover lingers and sings, And the maid remembers.
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