We Made a Garden by Margery Fish Read Free Book Online

electric trimmer on a hedge so treated and therefore it is only practicable on a scale that can be covered by hand clipping. An electric hedge clipper is a great boon for hedges such as mine and I don’t know what we should do without it. It makes a better job of the trimming with straighter lines and more clean-cut edges.
    Lonicera nitida is the most obliging hedge material. It doesn’t mind being shaped like yew, and I have seen extremely good birds and animals cut from it. It makes a very good little edging hedge instead of box, and can be kept just as small as a box hedge. Some of the cottages in this village have trained it into green porches by dint of careful and regular trimming, and I know one house where it has been grown as a great solid block of close green over six feet high for a screen. In fact you can use it in any way you want but you must go on trimming it regularly.
    A lavender hedge can be grown just as easily, although not so quickly as a lonicera one. Cuttings pushed into the soil root very easily. When making either a lonicera or lavender hedge it is a good plan to have a little cache of spare plants in an odd corner. Some of the hedge cuttings may be obstinate and refuse to root and then you have a reserve of the same sized plants to fill in the gaps. Santolina makes a delightful silver hedge and can be clipped like lavender.
    Some gardens call for a natural hedge and here there is wonderful scope. Hardy fuschias look lovely falling over a wall, Kerria japonica rewards one with its bright golden flowers, and for a taller hedge there are laurustinus, old-fashioned roses or cypresses. In a very big garden tall cypress trees, grown without clipping, make a delightful background and save a great deal of work.
    I persuaded Walter to put a beech hedge round the orchard. It took a lot of persuasion because for years he had complained that beeches were still clothed in their brown winter leaves when all the rest of the trees were gaily flaunting their delicate spring green. He agreed to beech in the end because we didn’t want quickthorn, the price of yew would have been prohibitive and we didn’t think anything else would be at all suitable for an orchard. In the end Walter became quite attached to his cosy brown hedge. Though he didn’t mind it in the winter he complained in the spring, but agreed that the delicate green of the leaves when they did come was worth waiting for. One clipping a year in August is all it requires and I still think that decision was a good one. Perhaps we might have made it copper beech but that, I think, is a little too refined for an orchard. In a garden copper beech is lovely and I often wonder why more people do not put in hedges of this in their gardens. I know several and they are always a delight to me.

7. The Terraced Garden
    While the lawn and drive were being made I had to work as a labourer with Walter and the garden boy, but when they were finished I was at last permitted to go off and amuse myself in what was to be my part of the garden, the flower beds. I had long been considering what should be done with the ground on the west of the house. This was on a higher level than the rest and sloped up to a small orchard. We were lucky that our garden was on different levels. A garden that is completely flat is difficult to make interesting. We all know gardens that start as a field and finish as a field, no matter what the owners do in the way of trouble and expense. The kindest thing fate can do to you is to give you a garden that slopes away from the house. The upward slope is more difficult to deal with as great care has to be taken that it does not become top heavy.
    When we bought the house this part of the garden rose sharply to the orchard without path or form. The speculator who sold the house to us had put in a few miserable gooseberry bushes, but they were choked with couch grass. In fact, it was nothing but a wilderness and looked the most uninspiring