Reading them, it was easy to imagine myself as Gertrude Jekyll, or Vita Sackville-West, creating visions of splendor in my own backyard.
Most of us are not in England where the climate allows such lushness (although you might come close if you live in the Pacific Northwest.)And few of us are Gertrude Jekyll with her innate style and taste and eye for flawless garden design. Nor do most of us have the room for the 100 foot long borders which allowed her to create such pictures of perfection. Yet far too often we continue to sigh over pictures in British gardening books, wondering why our home garden doesn't look like that.
I began my own first garden in imitation of that British institution, the all white garden. In British hands it can be a lovely thing, with pure whites glowing against deep greens, muted by silvers. I dutifully bought artimesia, to provide the requisite silver.(You can see it in the picture at the top of the page.) I planted everything the nursery had that said "white" on the color tag. I laid it out just as the books told me: little circles showing what size the plant would grow to, indicating eventual height, all on a grid to aid me in planting.
That looked silly. Here was this huge space around this tiny peony shoot. And there was this gigantic rose bush lording it over a minute quart pot of stokes aster. And these little sprigs of dusty miller looked forlorn. I had followed directions to the "t" and it looked nothing at all like Sissinghurst.There was dirt showing everywhere.
So I did what any self-respecting and clueless new gardener might do. I ran to the corner store and bought flats of white petunias. White snapdragons. White anything!
And then I discovered that white flowers weren't white. Some were cream. Some had pinkish tones. Believe it or not--some of them clashed.
Back to the nursery. I am lucky that my favorite nursery Greystone Gardens is owned by the perfect person for a Gertrude Jekyll wannabe--a British gardener. He listened to my tale of woe and shook his head. The secret to an all white garden, he said, is that they aren't all white. And the secret to a successful garden in America is not to try to imitate those garden books. You live where you live, and you garden according to the size and soil you have. He sold me a rosebush--David Austin's Heritage, in a pale rose, to add some size and pastel punch, and to tie together the pink-y whites in the garden. And then he told me to be patient and let the rest grow. It will come, he told me, sooner than you believe. Soon you will be wondering how you ever thought all those plants would fit into one tiny garden. Of course I didn't believe him, and planted more white stuff.
