THERE are times when I wish I could switch off my ever present and highly alert gardener's eye. Last weekend I saw Atonement, the film based on Ian McEwan's Booker Prize winning novel at the Garrison Theatre. It is without doubt a cinematic masterpiece by anybody's standards, and I was particularly impressed with the minutiae of period detail.
But why, when such meticulous attention was paid to everything else, did they get it so very wrong in the floral department? There was that bunch of flowers, culled from the garden, seasonally correct at first glance with the night-scented stock and the roses, then it was all spoiled by the pink nerine blossom, way out of season, and a plant not renowned for its forcing properties. It got even worse. Foxgloves and harebells never, ever share a season, not even in the south of England, where the film was set, nor do they ever grow in such awfully predictable and whimsical distribution patterns. Quite nauseating.
Incongruous plantings on film sets are nothing new. There were some real clangers, and seriously nauseating distribution patterns in Ladies in Lavender, and I clearly remember a scene from one of the Superman films: the hero more or less circumnavigates the globe before alighting in a tropical forest where he proceeds to pick a bouquet of bird of paradise flowers. Nothing wrong with that except that the strelitzias in question grew next to a hosta-fringed waterfall. The two genera don't inhabit the same continent (one is African, the other Asian), let alone the same jungle. I could go on. Don't get me started on the incongruous flora in dinosaur films . . .
Wouldn't it be great though to have all one's favourite plants flowering at the same time and, preferably, for the whole season? That they don't is one of the hard lessons to learn for young and enthusiastic gardeners, and I have spent many hours trying to explain, at times vainly, that plants have their allotted seasons and that's that.
There are however, a few tricks one can learn. Let's say you want to plant an Atonement garden and desire your foxgloves to flower with the harebells. You could grow your harebells in pots and force them under glass. Alternatively you could remove the flowering stems from your digitalis as soon as they appear. That will delay their flowering considerably but you'll still have to experiment with the timing, perhaps de-bud twice to synchronise the performances of foxglove and Campanula rotundifolia.
If you ask me, I wouldn't bother. Life's too short to indulge such whims and it would help if the film industry at least tried to get it right rather than creating illusions that waken unrealistic, and dare I say feverish and dangerous, expectations in the young and impressionable gardener? Such flights of horticultural fancy are bound to end in tears - or worse - on the compost heap.
The Atonement foxgloves were all, as is to be expected on such occasions, at the peak of perfection, with just the right ratio - based on the golden section no doubt - of bud to open flower. Even those spikes already fully open miraculously had all their flowers intact, and had not, as is inevitably the case in nature, begun to drop the oldest ones before the uppermost are open.
Most plants, some slower, some faster, eventually run to seed. In some the first flush of youth is rapidly followed by that generally less well appreciated state of fruitfulness. Gardeners - as above the young and inexperienced - are stumped by this, and I recall - after all these years still with a lurching feeling in my stomach - the first ever small garden consultancy I did. The house I was called to didn't have much of a garden, just a mixed border running from the gate, and underneath a lofty stone staircase, to the other end of the property. Judging by their matted looks the plants hadn't received any attention for a number of years, and the gardener was, understandably, rather unhappy.
The fear of doing something wrong had prevented the owner from intervening but there was something else that inhibited the development of both garden and potential gardener. The latter expressed complete consternation at the fact that plants could not only turn from their state of colourful flowering into heaps of decomposing stems and soggy leaves (referred to as an awful mess) within a few weeks but were also bound to repeat that process year after year after year.
All my efforts failed and the next time I drove past that property sadly the border, quite a promising one at that, had made way for concrete slabs and a couple of dejected looking conifers in oversized tubs, contrary to my much more benign recommendations.
There is no helping the hidebound, and the obsessively tidy but most full-blooded human beings can be persuaded to embrace every stage of a plant's development. And by embracing I don't mean just aesthetic appreciation. There is great satisfaction in chopping those tall foxglove stems into shorter lengths and feeding them as vital roughage to one's compost heap, before the seeds get a chance to ripen.
Some plants have a knack of becoming almost invisible after their flowering is completed. Primroses are a case in point and don't mind being overlaid, overhung, even smothered by their neighbours during the summer. I often forget about mine completely until they remind me of their presence again by producing a few unseasonal blooms in the autumn.
When buying a plant we rarely give its off-season a second thought let alone ask ourselves if its dying is a graceful process. But in a small garden such considerations can make all the difference. Some gardeners play it safe and go all-out for evergreens. I'd find that a bit dull and would at least add a rowan, if only for its berries and rich autumn colour.
The other day I came across some very late and very brilliant rowan leaves, complete with bright green caterpillar, embedded in the backyard lawn, and the week before I felt compelled to return to the house for my camera when I found some colchicums in mid swansong. The flowers had fallen from the centre outwards, much like the spokes of a wheel, and formed a rather charming floral skirt amongst browning fern fronds.
All such things, small and incidental as they may be, can add immensely to the pleasure of a garden, provided the gardener has an eye for them. And it is a sad gardener indeed whose powers of perception can't be honed and expanded to appreciate such details.
There is of course that small group of perfect, or near perfect plants that manage to look well groomed all, or almost all, year round. Witch hazels are often described as dull in their off season by garden writers. All I can say to this is that the writers in question must have dull gardens, as in any reasonably varied and well planted garden a witch hazel out of season would scarcely be noticed, or could be used to support a clematis.
After a long summer obscurity it springs to prominence once more as its large hazel leaves turn the most vivid autumn colours. No sooner have they fallen, the flower buds and ripening seedpods become visible along the bare twigs, and I don't know of another shrub as laden with promise, as a well-budded witch hazel. The heavenly scented flowers start opening in late January. But then again, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. |
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