On Tuesday 26 September, we’re celebrating the new edition of Russell Page’s essential garden book The Education of a Gardener, in a talk with Garden Museum Director Christopher Woodward, design historian Dr Lucy Inglis and Page’s nephew Nigel Corbally Stourton. Ahead of the talk, we’re pleased to share this exclusive extract from the book, from the final chapter titled My Garden:
This book could have been called Other People’s Gardens if this title had not been used already. I have no garden of my own and what I have learned has been from the years of working on other people’s ground. But I allow myself day-dreams that I one day mean to have.
I hope that it will be on land which is neither chalky nor too acid, with soil to which I can add peat or lime. I hope, too, for soil which is not heavy clay that takes years of back-breaking labour to lighten, nor a hot dry sand whose thirst for water and manure I could never assuage.
It must be a small garden and a simple one; one man’s work, mine perhaps, and in any case not so large as to need an armoury of mechanical devices or a full-time mechanic to keep these in running order. However good the soil, the first thing I shall do will be to make two enclosures, for compost, each five feet wide by ten feet long and walled in to a height of three feet. Into these will go everything that in a few months will ensure me a regular supply of rich black humus, since I know no better way of having a garden relatively free from pests and diseases. There are limits to the time, trouble and money I am prepared to spend on spraying my garden with chemical preparations which can so easily destroy nature’s subtle balances and, by eliminating one pest, fatally leave the door open for others.
Once I have made this, the garden’s fitture larder, I can start to consider the site. First of all I should say that I plan to make my garden in England since, all things considered, I do not know a better country. I would rather start with an old garden, however badly arranged and however neglected, since a few mature trees, an old wall and even a few square yards of good soil will give me the advantage of a twenty year start, all the more so as l shall be so late a starter. First I shall take out all the rubbish, elder bushes, nettle beds and any trees which are ugly and misshapen or too crowded. I shall thin out old shrubberies without pity and prune back any specimens which I may wish to keep and, later perhaps, transplant. All soft green rubbish will go to the compost heaps, the rest I shall burn and save the wood ash where I can. Only when I have cleaned the garden and ridded it of everything I know I will not want, shall I make a careful survey on paper as a basis for an eventual plan.
My garden will be very simple. There will be no herbaceous borders, no rose garden and no complicated formal layout with all the bedding out, edge trimming and staking which these forms of gardening involve. A ground-floor room in the house or a converted outbuilding will be my workroom, part library for garden books and catalogues, part studio for drawing board and painting materials, part tool shed for all the small tools, string, raffia, tins of saved seed and all the odd extensions and aids to the gardener’s two hands.
I see my workroom with one wall all window, and below it a wide work table running its whole length with a place to draw and a place to write. Walls will be whitewashed, the floor of brick, there will be a fireplace and chairs for talk, and at least one wall lined with books.
This room will open south or westwards on to my working garden and I shall design this just like one of those black-japanned tin boxes of water-colours. I see this working garden as a rectangular space as large as I can afford and manage. With luck or good management or both, high walls will protect it to east and north and I shall enclose the other two sides with a low wall or a five feet yew or box hedge. Under the walls I shall make a three or four feet wide bed for climbing plants and others which like the warmth and shelter that a wall at their back will give them. I. shall then divide the rest into small beds, perhaps four and a half feet or five feet square, separated by eighteen inch paths of bricks on edge or stone or even pre-cast cement flags of a good texture and colour and set, like the bricks or stone, in a weak cement mixture so that no weeds can grow. The number of beds and their exact dimensions will depend on the area of my ground but they must be small enough to be easily accessible from the paths surrounding them. In working out my simple criss-cross pattern I shall surely find it useful to have a few beds as double units, nine feet by four foot six or ten feet by five feet. In fact this garden will closely resemble the ” system garden ” of an old botanical garden whose small beds are each devoted to growing numbers of the different plant families. I shall use this garden as paint box, palette and canvas, and in it I shall try out plants for their flower colour, texture of foliage and habit of growth. In some beds I shall set out seedlings for selection, in others bulbs, in others plants combined for essays in colour. Each bed will be autonomous, its own small world in which plants will grow to teach me more about their aesthetic possibilities and their cultural likes and dislikes. I shall make no attempt at a general effect, for this will be my personal vegetable museum, my art gallery of natural forms, a trial ground from which I will always learn. I may use a flowering tree here or there above some of my postage-stamp squares in places where I want to grow plants which appreciate a dappled shade, and I may hollow out a square or two as pools for water lilies or Iris kaempferi.
So, close to my workroom, I shall have my palette, changing from year to year and season to season and accessible and workable in any weather. I see already a square with tufts of white and coral-feathered, scarlet and rose-pink tulips whose foliage a5 it dies off will be covered by the new leaves, blue-grey, green or yellow-green striped with white, of the various hostas, and camassias with their sober flowers of lavender grey. ln another square will grow Euphorbia wulfcnii and hellebores and perhaps some long spurred aquilegias. There will be lilies too and lavender, some of the old-fashioned roses and all the garden pinks I can find. Perhaps I shall have a square or two of delphiniums, plants I like only in an enclosed garden. Here I shall test kurume azaleas for their colours as seen in sun or shade; primula species, rodgersias, moraeas and meconopses will grow in squares of specially moist and peaty soil, helianthemums and cistus in others which are sandy and dry. Here, I shall find, living and growing, the coloured expansions of my pleasures as a painter and gardener, as well as an addict of catalogues and dictionaries.