A BEAUTIFUL FRUIT GARDEN
There is a whole range of possible beautiful treatment in fruit-growing
that is rarely carried out or even attempted. Hitherto but little
has been done to make the fruit garden a place of beauty; we find it
almost flaunting its unloveliness, its white painted orchard-houses
and vineries, its wires and wire nettings. It is not to be denied that
all these are necessary, and that the usual and most obvious way of
working them does not make for beauty. But in designing new gardens or
remodelling old, on a rather large scale, there need be no difficulty
in so arranging that all that is necessarily unbeautiful should be kept
in one department, so hedged or walled around as to be out of sight.
In addition to such a fruit garden for strict utility I have in mind a
walled enclosure of about an acre and a half, longer than wide, laid
out as shown in the plan. I have seen in large places just such spaces,
actually walled but put to no use.
The wall has trained fruit-trees--Peaches spreading their goodly
fans, Pears showing long, level lines, and, including hardy Grape
Vines, giving all the best exposition of the hardy fruit-grower's
art. Next to the wall is a space six feet wide for ample access to
the fruit-trees, their pruning, training and root-management; then a
fourteen-foot plant border, wholly for beauty, and a path eight feet
wide. At a middle point on all four sides the high wall has an arched
doorway corresponding to the grassy way between the fruit-trees in
the middle space. If the wall has some symmetrical building on the
outside of each angle so much the better; the garden can make use
of all. One may be a bothy, with lower extension out of sight; one
a half-underground fruit-store, with bulb-store above; a third a
paint-shop, and a fourth a tea-house.
The middle space is all turf; in the centre a Mulberry, and, both ways
across, double lines of fruit-trees, ending with Bays; the Bays are
at the ends on the plan. In almost any part of the sea-warmed south
of England, below the fifty-first parallel of latitude which passes
through the upper part of Sussex, the rows of fruit-trees on the
green might be standard Figs; elsewhere they would be bush Pears and
Apples. If the soil is calcareous, so much the better for the Figs and
Mulberry, the Vines and indeed nearly all the fruits. The angle-clumps
in the grass are planted with Magnolias, Yuccas and Hydrangeas.
The border all round is for small shrubs and plants of some solidity or
importance; the spaces are too long for an ordinary flower border. It
would have a good bush of _Magnolia stellata_ at each angle, Yuccas,
Tritomas, hardy Fuchsias, Peonies, _Euphorbia Wulfenii_, Hollyhocks,
Dahlias, Hydrangeas, Michaelmas Daisies, Flag Iris, the beautiful
_Olearia Gunni_ and _O. Haastii_, Tree Lupines, Forsythia, Weigela,
the smaller Bush Spiræas, Veronicas, Tamarisk, the large-bloomed
Clematises, bush kinds of garden Roses, Funkias, and so on.
[Illustration: _THE BEAUTIFUL FRUIT GARDEN._]
Surely my fruit garden would be not only a place of beauty, of pleasant
sight and pleasant thought, but of leisurely repose, a repose broken
only faintly and in welcome fashion by its own interests--in July,
August and September a goodly place in which to wander and find
luscious fruits in quantity that can be gathered and eaten straight
from the tree. There is a pleasure in searching for and eating fruit in
this way that is far better than having it picked by the gardener and
brought in and set before one on a dish in a tame room. Is this feeling
an echo of faraway days of savagery when men hunted for their food
and rejoiced to find it, or is it rather the poet's delight of having
direct intercourse with the good gift of the growing thing and seeing
and feeling through all the senses how good and gracious the thing is?
To pass the hand among the leaves of the Fig-tree, noting that they are
a little harsh upon the upper surface and yet soft beneath; to be aware
of their faint, dusky scent; to see the cracking of the coat of the
fruit and the yellowing of the neck where it joins the branch--the two
indications of ripeness--sometimes made clearer by the drop of honeyed
moisture at the eye; then the handling of the fruit itself, which
must needs be gentle because the tender coat is so readily bruised
and torn; at the same time observing the slight greyish bloom and the
colouring--low-toned transitions of purple and green; and finally to
have the enjoyment of the luscious pulp, with the knowledge that it is
one of the most wholesome and sustaining of fruit foods--surely all
this is worthy garden service! Then how delicious are the sun-warmed
Apricots and Peaches, and, later in the year, the Jargonelle Pears,
always best eaten straight from the tree; and the ripe Mulberries of
September. And how pleasant to stroll about the wide grassy ways,
turning from the fruits to the flowers in the clumps and borders, to
the splendid Yuccas and the masses of Hydrangea bloom, and then to the
gorgeous Tritomas and other delights; and to see the dignity of the
stately Bay-trees and the incomparable beauty of their every twig and
leaf.
The beautiful fruit garden would naturally lead to the orchard, a
place that is not so often included in the pleasure-ground as it
deserves. For what is more lovely than the bloom of orchard-trees
in April and May, with the grass below in its strong, young growth;
in itself a garden of Cowslips and Daffodils. In an old orchard how
pictorial are the lines of the low-leaning old Apple-trunks and the
swing and poise of their upper branches, best seen in winter when their
graceful movement of line and wonderful sense of balance can be fully
appreciated. But the younger orchard has its beauty too, of fresh,
young life and wealth of bloom and bounteous bearing.
Then if the place of the orchard suggests a return to nearer
pleasure-ground with yet some space between, how good to make this
into a free garden orchard for the fruits of wilder character; for
wide-spreading Medlars, for Quinces, again some of the most graceful
of small British trees; for Service, Damson, Bullace, Crabs and their
many allies, not fruit-bearing trees except from the birds' and
botanists' points of view, but beautiful both in bloom and berry, such
as the Mountain Ash, Wild Cherry, Blackthorn, and the large-berried
White-thorns, Bird-cherry, White Beam, Holly and Amelanchier. Then all
these might be intergrouped with great brakes of the free-growing Roses
and the wilder kinds of Clematis and Honeysuckle. And right through
it should be a shady path of Filberts or Cobnuts arching overhead and
yielding a bountiful autumn harvest.