Gardening
High walls
Denis Wood
Blank walls, especially high ones, need some ingenuity to rescue them from being monotonous and forbidding. I have in mind a particular instance in which a fairly large house was built at the foot of steeply sloping land, requiring a 15 ft high retaining wall, which was built in an arc occupying nearly half a circle, only 50 ft away from the back of the house, and making a dank, dark courtyard. Some obvious amelioration can be achieved by putting in some of those tall climbing plants which will endure a fairly dark situation. Ivy, particularly the Irish ivy with its large shining leaves, would probably grow there most successfully. The climbing Hydrangea petiolaris, with a potential height of over 50 ft, would also fill the bill, and so might some of the older ,climbing roses, which really know their business as climbers and can get to 30 ft: Madame Alfred Carriere or Gloire de Dijon, but they would expect to get their patrician heads into the sunshine somewhere on the way up.
A really tall wall might, from a construction point of view, need buttresses 10 ft or so apart, providing a splendid excuse for making them into caryatids, one of my very favourite architectural devices. There is a good set of them at Blenheim, and there is an illustration of them on the garden front of the Great Palace at Tsarskoe Selo in Christopher Marsden's enchanting book, Palmyra of the North. It is high time that this book was reprinted.
In good houses the fenestration is worked out to give just the right amount of light inside and, at the same time, relief to the façade, which might often be compromised by climbing plants. This is not to say that such perfect buildings do not benefit from some sort of organic form reading in the same context with them — nearby trees, for example; but on dull, even commonplace houses, a large Magnolia grandiflora or wistaria might redeem architectural shortcomings. Poor windows can be immeasurably improved by shutters folding back against the walls and enlarging or altering the outline of mean apertures.
To return to gardens, a southfacing terrace, if exposed to the east, can be a draughty place without some sort of screen. A wing wall made out of the same material as the house, and ending perhaps with a ramp up to a solid resolute pier and finial, will give protection for a distance up to three times its height, and even 24 ft from an 8 ft wall is enough to make a warm corner into which to draw chairs on a bright March day when the east wind is keen. The best way to relieve the blankness in such a wing wall is to make an inviting-looking dcior, solid, white-painted, with prominent black hinges and handle.
Some architects today seem to pursue a self-appointed duty of rubbing into us how horrid the world is, by rearing up enormous high blank walls, taller than any trees, to warehouses with their backs on to streets, where ant-like humans cower and shrink on their petty business — dead plumcoloured brickwork, pointed with puritanical perfection in black mourning mortar. There are no windows because daylight is not needed inside, and anyway windows would reduce expensive storage space. Galleries would be too much to expect from the grocers of today, and so would a stepped back façade of blind arcades, but murals might just be managed, and at least some relief could have been provided by an ascending series of arrowslits lit from inside at night; and with stuffed owls behind them to frighten off the starlings by day.
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