From Even More For Your Garden
By Vita Sackville-West
August 21, 1956
Mid-August means the beginning of autumn, so we had better bravely make up our minds to it. Not that I have anything to say against autumn as such. On certain days we may well be tempted to think it the most richly beautiful of seasons. It is only as a portent that we deplore it.
In a small square garden enclosed by holly hedges, I have been making notes on some plants in flower just now. They are all in the same range of color–yellow, red, orange–which explains why people often call it the sunset garden. At its best it glows and flames. The dark hedges enhance the effect. Ideally, the hedges ought to be draped in ropes and curtains of the scarlet Tropaeolum speciosum, the Flame Flower so rampant in the North; but this must be a Scottish Nationalist by conviction, for it will have little to say to Sassenach persuasions.
The rest of the garden makes up for the lack. There are red-hot pokers, tiger lilies, montbretias, and that thing which looks like a giant montbretia, Antholyza, inevitably known as Aunt Eliza though nobody’s Aunt Eliza could ever have looked so garrish. The yellows are represented by the shrubby St. John’s Wort, Hypericum var. hidcote…More yellows come in that coarse, tall, feathery groundsel, Senecio tanguticum, and in some gaillardias and in some belated yarrows and potentillas, with golden pansies as a groundwork in front of some Orange Bedder snapdragons. Some Lilium henryi, one of the easiest of lilies, rise taller than a tall man amongst rose bushes of Mrs. Van Rossem; a patch of zinnias gives a dash of orange just where it is needed; the dahlia Bishop of Llandaff sets its dark green leaves and dark flower in a shady corner; the brilliance of the new hybrid, Venidio-arctotis, blazes a narrow bed just where the sun strikes to make it open.
Have I exaggerated? Of course I have. The little garden was not quite like that, but it came very close to the idea, and there seems to be no reason why one day it should not fulfill the conception of its owner. That is the whole essence and excitement of gardening: to conceive a picture in the mind, and gradually year by year to improve it towards its completion.
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