Sissinghurst – the Moat Walk
‘In the afternoon I moon about with Vita (Sackville-West) trying to convince her that planning is an element in gardening. I want to show her that the top of the moat-walk bank must be planted with forethought and design. She wishes just to jab in the things which has left over. The tragedy of the romantic temperament is that it dislikes form so much that it ignores the effect of masses. She wants to put in stuff which ‘will give alovely red colour in the autumn’. I wish to put in stuff which will furnish shape to the perspective. In the end we part, not as friends.’
Category: Gardening and Gardeners: historical snapshots
‘Sow Lettuce, Raddish -‘
John Evelyn 1686 (published 1932)
Old School Gardener
Orange Tree in Terracotta Pot by Jose Escofet
‘Bring forth of the Greene-house the Oranges, lemons and most tender Ever- greenes, trim and refresh them, placing them in shade a fortnight, by degrees accostuming them to the sunn: sow also cabbage-seedes, Lettuce, French-beanes, Harricos &c.’
John Evelyn 1686 (published 1932)
Old School Gardener
Artichokes- now’s the time to plant ‘slips’ or suckers, says Evelyn
‘Set Artichok-slips, transplant cabages, sow Lettuce, clip hedges, & greenes; & sow the seedes of all hot sweete-herbs & plants.’
John Evelyn 1686 (published 1932)
Old School Gardener
‘Sow Endive, Succory, Chervil, Sellerie, purselan (which you may also continue sowing all the summer to have tender) leeks, Beetes, parsneps, salsifix, skirrits, Turneps &c. and now Cherish and Earth-up your flowers, and set stakes to the tallest: sow also lettuce.’
Grow lettuce- on a fence!
John Evelyn 1686 (published 1932)
OK, who knows what a skirrit is?!
Old School Gardener
‘Naile yet and prune: sow all sorts of Kernels, towards ye later end Melons and rare seedes on the Hot-bed.’
John Evelyn 1686 (published 1932)
‘In this moneth Graff (graft) in the cleft, decrease of the Moone; and towards the end thereof prune wall fruit, ’til the sap rises briskly, especially finish cutting your vines.’
John Evelyn 1686 (published 1932)
‘A garden is not made in a year; indeed it is never made in the sense of finality. It grows, and with the labour of love should go on growing.’
Frederick Eden, 1903
‘With flowers, as with all other departments of the garden, you first decide what kind you want to grow and then whittle it down to what kind you can grow in the space. When you have further gone through the list and reduced it to what you can afford to grow and then eliminated the ones which you know from bitter experience will refuse to grow you have saved yourself a very great deal of labour indeed.’
Ethelind Fearon 1952
‘Herbs are used for two purposes:
a. to add a flavour that isn’t there but should have been;
b. to take away a flavour that is there that shouldn’t be.’
William Rushton ‘The Alternative Gardener’ (1986).
David Bryson reviews this book on Amazon and in it he says :
‘It is quite a few years now since Willie Rushton died from a heart attack, aged barely 60. He had been a prominent figure among the British satirists of the 1960’s, appearing on the BBC shows That Was the Week That Was and Not So Much a Programme. He also contributed in a major way to Private Eye in its effervescent early manner, and continued to grace it with occasional cartoons more or less until his death. He was an exceptionally gifted artist, with a distinctive and unmistakable style, and it is a great and sentimental pleasure to find so much of his drawing in this amusing little volume. As a humorist he was quirky, sometimes a little bit mechanical and indeed occasionally downright unintelligible, but at his best very funny indeed, again in his own very personal way. To my own dying day I shall treasure the memory of a cartoon following outrage among the Conservative government in 1964 that Harold Wilson, then leader of the opposition, had stepped in and settled a strike without saying by your leave or with your leave to the government. Rushton depicted an elderly newspaper vendor in a muffler and cloth cap handing a customer the Evening Standard bearing the headline WILSON ACTING AS IF HE IS PRIME MINISTER. To this Rushton’s old newspaper-seller added `More than you could say for some.’
Old School Garden 