We are but shrubs, no cedars we. (Titus Andronicus)
Connoissez vous ce fruit, qu’avec plaisir on mange
Agréable surmount au moment des chaleurs
Et qu’on a bien raison d’appeler une orange
Car il en a le goût, la forme et la couleur. (L’orange, Tristan Bernard)
It was roses, roses, all the way,
With myrtle mixed in my path like mad:
The house-roofs seemed to heave and sway,
The church-spires flamed, such flags they had,
A year ago on this very day. (The Patriot, Browning)
God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man; without which, buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks; and a man shall ever see, that when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely; as if gardening were the greater perfection. I do hold it, in the royal ordering of gardens, there ought to be gardens, for all the months in the year, in which several things of beauty may be then in season. (Of Gardens, Francis Bacon)
Resplendent in a gold and white uniform (Peter Coats) presided over the upkeep of the Lutyens garden at Delhi, directing with a wave of a trowel this stupendous creation, stepping gingerly among the cannas and the golden orioles. Never since the days of Xenophon has a soldier, and an aide-de-camp to boot, been so precise and efficient a gardener. (Harold Nicolson)
The gardens were a constant pleasure to me, and I rate them as Lutyens’s greatest Indian achievement. For months of the year, before they dried up completely and lay dormant, the Mogul Garden was an oriental carpet of bright colour. That their architectural framework – the paths, steps, balustrades and fountain basins – all should have been built in a particularly unfortunate combination of dirty white and dirty pink coloured sandstone was a pity: and I could not do anything about it. But out of the wide choice of annual flowers available in India I replanted the garden, when replanting time came, with the least garish flowers available, avoiding the strident reds and oranges which the Indian gardeners loved. And I ‘softened’ the overall effect (and saved some labour) by planting more shrubs and trees to give the garden a fresh green look in the hot weather when the flowerbeds were bare. (Peter Coats)
South Uist is a bare island, well into the Atlantic, thinly populated and with few trees … The Atlantic waves of icy dark blue sea reverberated day and night on white deserted beaches. The house, with its walled garden of ragged dahlias and white daisies, was set in a flat moonscape of dark peat bogs and vivid stretches of heather and golden gorse. Overhead wheeled every kind of sea-gull, and sometimes, towards the east, above Mount Hecla, there were eagles. (Peter Coats)
All these cuttings are taken from of Generals and Gardens, the Autobiography of Peter Coats, 1976.