AA-2026-543DC3
On the image
Someone spent a whole spring bent over this bed with bamboo canes and garden twine, because a delphinium left to its own devices will fall over the moment it flowers, which is the plant's way of punishing ambition. The spires of blue and white here are the reward for that discipline, arranged in the tiered, colour-graded fashion that 1960s garden manuals insisted was the difference between a border and a mere collection of plants.
Roses climb along the back in the loose, slightly out-of-control way that suggests the gardener's real skill went into the delphiniums and the roses were left to manage their own affairs. A single pole rises behind the foliage, doing the unglamorous work of holding up either a rose or a washing line, the sort of detail garden photography of the period preferred not to explain. The whole planting has the studied, un-showy grandeur of a border designed to be admired from a deck chair rather than photographed for anyone else's benefit.
Nothing in the frame asks to be looked at directly, which was rather the point of the style. A well-run herbaceous border in this era was meant to look like it had always been there, the staking and dividing and feeding kept invisible, so a visitor would assume nature had simply arranged itself this tastefully, and only the person who did the staking would know better.
The historian's note
The herbaceous border reached its peak of popularity in Britain and parts of the Commonwealth during the mid-twentieth century, following principles laid down decades earlier by garden designers who advocated massed perennial plantings graded by height and colour rather than the bedding-out schemes of the Victorian era. Delphiniums, favoured for their height and blue tones rare among garden flowers, were a signature plant of this style and required staking, division every few years, and protection from slugs to perform reliably.
By the 1960s this kind of border was a fixture of country houses, public parks, and ambitious private gardens across Britain, Ireland, and parts of North America and Australasia, maintained through a combination of paid gardeners and increasingly, in private settings, the labour of the homeowner following advice from garden clubs and gardening magazines of the day.
The combination of roses and delphiniums shown reflects a common pairing in period planting schemes, valued for the contrast between the roses' rounded form and the delphiniums' vertical spikes.
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Staked Delphiniums and Roses in a 1960s Herbaceous Border. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-543DC3. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/staked-delphiniums-and-roses-in-a-1960s-herbaceous-border.
@misc{aaAA2026543DC3,
title = {Staked Delphiniums and Roses in a 1960s Herbaceous Border},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-543DC3},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/staked-delphiniums-and-roses-in-a-1960s-herbaceous-border}
}TY - ART TI - Staked Delphiniums and Roses in a 1960s Herbaceous Border PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-543DC3 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/staked-delphiniums-and-roses-in-a-1960s-herbaceous-border ER -
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