The pace at which some plants, no matter how discouraging the weather,
manage to swell out their tissues, and to spring aloft under one’s very
eyes, is an unfailing marvel, and in this unpropitious soil the marvel
seems all the greater. So many quite common plants decline to live in it
in its natural state, that one’s gratitude goes out all the more to the
few that are willing to put up with us as we are. Foremost amongst such
obliging vegetables stand the mulleins, and foremost amongst the
mulleins stands that really noble person, Verbascum olympicum. If it has
a fault it is that it is _too_ good-natured, and _too_ vigorous. Not
only does it attain to its robust proportions at a rate that takes one’s
breath away, but further it increases so rapidly, and with such a
reckless prodigality, as threatens to people the whole neighbourhood
with its descendants. Seeing that each of such descendants requires as
much space for its development as does its parent, the perplexed
gardener wonders at times how he is to dispose of his too obliging
property, and ends by being not a little embarrassed by his own wealth.
There was one day last summer, when, returning home after a short
absence, and going into the garden, I was not a little startled to
discover what a congregation of the giants we had unwittingly been
entertaining. A giant may of course be highly ornamental, and a giant
that is eight feet high, and of a bright canary-yellow throughout the
greater part of that length, is almost bound to be so. There were--I
took the trouble to count them--one hundred and eleven such giants at
that moment all in flower together in the garden. Now considering that
the proportions of that garden are not those of Kew or Versailles, there
is no denying that one hundred and eleven bright yellow giants, all
occupying it at the same time, affected the mind with a certain sense of
surplusage! They stood in rows along the grassy paths; they shouldered
one another, and everything else out of any place they had been allowed
to spring up in; they appeared unexpectedly in out-of-the-way corners of
the copse, where the elderly oak-scrub found itself reduced to the
position of a mere underling at the feet of these aspiring biennials. To
come suddenly round a corner was to receive an impression of being
surrounded by a crowd of gigantic, lemon-coated attendants, all standing
respectfully at attention, an experience naturally rather trying to mere
modest humanity.
There is another equally large and complacent biennial, which, on
account perhaps of that very complacence, I find myself constantly
treating with the scantiest civility. It has not I think quite the solid
strength and impressive bearing of the great mullein, but as regards
height, is often even more gigantesque. This is the large variety of
Œnothera biennis, familiar to most people as Œnothera Lamarckiana,
but possessing no English name that I am aware of beyond the generic,
and not very descriptive one of “Evening primrose.” There are a good
many varieties of evening primroses in gardens, both perennials and
biennials, and a few true species, of which missouriensis, otherwise
macrocarpa, is undoubtedly one of the best. Lamarckiana on the other
hand is hardly a subject for the garden proper. As a tenant of steep
banks, of rough borders; of all sorts of half, or three-quarter wild
places, it has in this soil no competitor, or only finds such
competitors in the two biggest of the mulleins.
I have been trying this year the experiment of planting it along both
sides of the green walk that crosses the upper part of our copse.
Whether it will endure the amount of shade that it will find there
remains to be seen. It is a sun-lover by nature, like most of its tribe,
but its growth is so redundant that a little curtailment of it will do
it no great harm. Though less spreading, it requires almost more room
than the verbascums, for, if the space it covers is less, it is a true
biennial, never failing in my experience to flower the year after it is
sown. With Verbascum olympicum this is not so. There are some here at
this moment that were sown three years ago, and have not yet flowered.
They will do so no doubt this year, and with that event the cycle of
their existence ends. The worst is that the gap they leave when they die
is large; moreover, as in the case of foxgloves, the black stump is both
an ugly object in itself, and a difficult one to get rid of. When are we
to possess a really good perennial foxglove I wonder? There is a
perennial _yellow_ one, but it is a poor thing, hardly worthy of its
name. Perennial verbascums are also few in number, most of the family
showing a more or less aloe-like fashion of flowering. In their case one
is able to console oneself. The imagination grows a trifle giddy in fact
at the thought of every mullein one has seen spring from seed remaining
as a permanent possession; always equally towering, and equally
clamorous of space and sunlight. Many-acred would be the garden that
could support them all!