OMISSIONS
By Barry Pain
There are smuts in London.
There is also a tradition about the smuts in London, and it may be as well to differentiate the facts and the tradition. According to tradition, everywhere within a six-mile radius from Charing Cross smuts fall heavily and continuously. Nothing will grow. No green things can exist. A sheet of paper exposed to the open air becomes black in three seconds, and a thick layer of carbon covers everything. There are many people who believe this. I was told so only the other night by a beautiful lady to whom I had inadvertently jabbered about my garden. By the way, she was wearing a white dress. Why?
The fact is that there are as many smuts as one can reasonably want—and perhaps a few more—in the city and in Mayfair. There are not so many as there used to be, because there is less smoke. Electricity does not smoke. Up in St John’s Wood and Hampstead the smuts are very much diminished. Probably if I climbed one of my trees I should find my hands black. But I am not a boy nor a gorilla, that I should do this thing. I read or write in the garden, and I find that no smut settles on the white page. I dine under the tall trees, and the white cloth remains unpolluted. I may possibly get an elm-seed in my soup, but that is another matter. (Can anyone tell me, by the way, why the elm produces such an amazing lot of seeds and sows them broadcast, with a preference for places where they can never by any possibility germinate?) This is all quite contrary to tradition, but it happens to be the truth.
There is a good time coming—the time when smoke will be eliminated. The London garden will doubtless be an easier and cleaner matter then. But meanwhile the London garden is not impossible. The evergreens are distinctly shop-soiled after the winter; but with the summer comes the fresh green, and in the summer London provides us with less smoke from fewer fires. Beautiful white dresses must be washed or cleaned, and after all the garden has its hose and its rain-showers.
The tradition is inept as it stands, but it has a basis of truth. There is very much that must be omitted in the London garden. There are flowers that never come to town. Speaking generally, bulbs will do less work here than they will in the country. After the first year the tulips get tired. But as a compensation for the many things which one must omit, come the many other things which one may omit.
The liberty of the subject is too much circumscribed, but I believe that there is no law in this country which compels a man to grow the Jacoby geranium. This does not seem to be generally understood. Look at the window-boxes of London, and look at the gardens. Mayfair as a rule is ambitious and kills quite pretty things in its window-boxes; but elsewhere all too frequently one finds the Jacoby geranium and the edging of blue lobelia. I think that people get these things and grow them just exactly as they pay their dog licence—not because they want to do it but because they feel they must. There is probably an organised conspiracy between florists and jobbing gardeners to promote Jacobys. “You will be wanting some geraniums,” says the florist decisively, and you are hypnotised into believing it. “What could we have in that bed?” you ask the jobbing gardener. “A few Jacobys,” he says, with the air of a man who has had a bright idea. If he does not edge them with blue lobelia, he edges them with some yellow stuff which I think he calls pyrethrum. One has only to smell it once never to try it again. At the same time there are some super-cultured people who carry the hatred of the geranium to an unreasonable extent. There is a white one which does not make me ill, and a pink one which is not too hideous. But as it happens, the only geranium in my garden is the one which is grown solely for the scent of its leaves. One year where geraniums might have been I had blue-violet verbenas, sweet-scented and just as easy to grow. I was told to hairpin them to the ground, but out of obstinacy I grew them upright. They did not seem to mind. I have no rage against the blue lobelia, if it is put in a safe place where its colour can do no harm. I do not know why the white lobelia has so much less popularity. One is not bound to grow it as an edging. Now I come to think of it, I believe I hate all edgings.
I am not very fond of those flowers which are distinctively villa flowers. I do not think there is any man alive who could sell me a yellow calceolaria or persuade me to find room for it in my garden. The fuschia too is rather a self-conscious and ostentatious thing, though I admit the tree-fuschia. To these I prefer musk, and mignonette, and heliotrope. They flourish in a wet summer, and I wish I did. Lilies and carnations of course one must have, and London permits it. London pride is common enough, but I like it and grow it. It is a generous thing that asks little and gives much. If only its graceful flower were expensive, it would be greatly admired. The white and yellow marguerites are of no dazzling rarity, but I welcome them. Hosts of the old-fashioned perennials are desirable and possible, though there are some of them that need to be watched. The sunflower, for instance, is distinctly greedy and would take the whole garden if it could get it.
If a general principle of omission and selection for a London garden could be formulated, it would probably run as follows—choose cottage-garden things and avoid villa-garden things. In this way you will get all that is simple and sweet-scented and easy of cultivation, and nothing which is formal and perky. There are men who at present do earn large salaries by making gardens perky. The pity of it!
I have myself seen a long bed covered with things of different coloured foliage in geometrical patterns. “You may see as good Sights, many times, in Tarts.” Thank you, my Lord Verulam, for those words. Looking at such a bed one did not see the flowers only. The eye of imagination lingered on all that must have conduced to its preparation—all the pegs, and string, and perspiration, and misplaced cleverness. A garden may easily be over-educated, and that which is good in itself may suffer from improvement.
