Gardening
End of summer
Denis Wood
By the end of the summer the garden is a source of boredom and exhaustion. The bright awakening trumpets of autumn are still far' away. The daemon has departed. It is time to leave. To drive through the night to the sea, to get away on the ebb in a sullen grey morning, to spend a week or a fortnight chiefly out of sight of land and, after days of , seasickness and cold and fear, to come back on the flood, unshaved, dishevelled, not much washed but shriven, purged in the stillness of that dawn, to look at gardens and flowers again with eyes refreshed. Everywhere there will be Japanese anemones, the old white Honorine Jobert; this must be a long-lived plant because it is seen so often growing where it must have been forgotten, rising out of little gaps in paving where an old bed must have been covered in the rector's garden of an Oxford college, or in some corner of a cottage garden. Fairly tall at 3 ft with a spare aristocratic outline and classic flowers, this is above all the flower of autumn worth a million of your mildewy Michaelmas daisies.
In the churchyard of St Just you .could at one time see Acanthus rnollis descending in tall irregular ranks down the steep slope to the church and the little quay. Unlike the spreading anemone, this is an erect plant of unassailable dignity. The flower spikes derive their special mysterious charm from both the bracts and the petals. The flowers themselves are whitish with lilac veining and are hooded with bracts, green and mauve.
From St Just, if you work the tide, you can pull up to Trelissick , at half-flood so that you shall come down again on the ebb. It is now National Trust property and here I first saw crinums in their perfection in the middle of wide double-sided herbaceous borders. They are best seen in such a situation where their profuse straggly sword-shaped leaves are, in part at least, concealed until the flowers are borne at the end of crimson stems, in umbels of about ten on each spike. These trumpet lily-shaped flowers, about 4 ins. long, are either white (Crinum powellii album) or in shades of pink (C. powelli). This plant, C. powellii, is a hybrid and one of the -very few of the genus hardy out of doors in the South of England. It would seem that they are seldom planted now, but they are so beautiful and still unusual that one ought to see much more of them. The large bulbs are planted in May. Crinurns go very well with agapanthus, which also come from South Africa. The comparatively
,new Headbourne hybrids are entirely hardy,at any rate in the South of England. They are generally available only as mixed colours. I was fortunate in mine, the flowers are violet-blue, two dozen or more of them from each root.
Thereare two other bulbous plants seen at this time of the year — Amaryllis bella donna used often to.be seen against the brick wall of a heated greenhouse, the flowers, sweetly scented, are again borne in umbels of two or four, usually pale pink but a pink informed with blue. The other is Nerine bowdenii, a hybrid and one of the few comparatively hardy in this country and certainly hardly in the South. The flowers, once again, are borne in umbels and appear before the leaves are fully developed. Their colours are shades of pink and red and, according to Patrick M. Synge in his Collins Guide to Bulbs, they owe their peculiar quality or iridescence to the shape of their epidermal cells which are shaped like lenses and concentrate light on to drops of pink sap at the base of the cells. The flower segments are narrower and more curly than those of the belle donna lily, making it, by ciamparison, a more refined plant as may be seen from the coloured illustration in the Oxford Book of Garden Flowers where all four of the lastment ioned are illustrated together.
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