Changing colours II

I had meant to write a bit about the beautiful month of May which, according to this wonderful magazine, is the month of bliss and joy for garden lovers. It’s a bit late now, May has come and gone, but not without leaving behind a few precious impressions which I want to share with you.

In late April, the fields were full of rapeseed and wonderfully lemon yellow and the trees were tender spring green; at the end of May and in early June there are all sorts of colours. I love the white of the common yarrow and its many siblings, and of assorted chamomiles. And the red poppies and blue cornflower…I simply love to see how the seasons change from spring to summer!

And now my absolute favourites:

Life is beautiful!

Where do dreams come from though?

Iris Sibirica, by Erich Arends, no date

Kein Fortschritt ohne Wagnis. Wer Träume verwirklichen will, muss wacher sein und tiefer träumen als andere. (Karl Foerster)

Gerhard Finckh und Solveig Maria Schuppler (2010) Natur wird Kunst. Georg Arends. Wuppertal: Von der Heydt-Museum. S. 33

Longing for “rabbit-nibbled, sheep-cropped grass”

 

Vita Sackville-West's gardens at Sissinghurst Castle

Lady Ottoline Morrell's gardens at Garsington Manor

Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, both members of the Bloomsbury Group, lived in this 'small cottage'

Bloomsbury coexisted in Bloosmbury and in simple farmhouses on the Downs, where they had servant problems and problems with plumbing. They loved the earth, but they loved it for something irretrievably lost, as well as for its smells and scents and filth and bounce and clog and crumble. Those great masters of the description of the English earth, Richard Jeffries and later W.H. Hudson, who can describe the whole expanse of the clean air, and the currents in it, and the rabbit-nibbled, sheep-cropped grass on the Downs, the close trees in coppices, the solitary thorns shaped by the wind, the fish fanning against the current, the birds riding the thermal flow, so that we think they are our guide to the unspoiled green and pleasant land – both of these are in fact men of a Silver Age, elegiac. They spend pages listing the species of birds and mammals erased from their land by pheasant-rearing gamekeepers. The goshawk, the pole cat, the pine marten, gone, gone away. Pike decimated. Trees tidied out of their wild shapes and habits. The Golden Age was when no humans interfered with anything.

from A.S. Byatt (2009) The Children’s Book. London: Vintage. p. 392

Sentiments which are not reflected in their gardens. (More on the Bloomsbury Group here.) How does one reflect such sentiments in gardens? Isn’t the idea of a garden itself destructive of the Golden Age already? A Silver Age phenomenon?