He turns his attention to the head gardener, who has been hovering in the background. They go through the houses — orchids, gardenias — a whole house full of these — a purple lasiandra climbing against a grey wall, the cool malmaisons, where he picks himself a button-hole, cherry-pie, verbena, sweet-scented geranium, and so out to the herbaceous border, his chief pride. He walks slowly, shoulders back, head high, constantly stopping to admire an effect. “But you can’t see the beauty of that, of course! I shall never be able to teach you. One can never teach anybody anything.”
In the border a small plant, flowerless as yet, is poking its head above the earth. He sees it at once and points at it with his stick. “What’s this? I’m sure I never told you to put this in.”
“Salvia, Sir William.”
“It may be salvia, but it’s not my salvia.”
“No, Sir William. There was a new kind recommended to me and I thought you might like to try it.”
“What colour is it?”
“I think it’s …”
“You think! Don’t you know?”
“Yes, Sir William. It’s red.”
“Red!” Sir William drops his voice to pronounce the word as if it were some awful mystery.
“Red!” He turns round to appeal for sympathy and, finding no one, looks up and takes the sky for confidant. “Red!” he says appalled to the passing clouds, “Red in a blue border!”
And he turns at last to the gardener: “How long have you been with me, Wilson?”
“Two years. Sir William.”
“Two years! About a record, I should think. During the whole of that time have you ever seen a red flower in this border?”
“No, Sir William.”
“No. Do you know why? Because I don’t like red. Because I won’t have that bloody colour here. I would as soon have you! And I’ll put you there next time. I’ll bury you there myself, if I see another red flower. Salvia Blue-beard. Do you understand? Blue-beard. So called, because it is blue! Take that thing out at once. You’re a nice man, Wilson, and love your wife as you should and go to church and all that sort of thing, and perhaps you’re the best gardener I have had, but you’re certainly the biggest fool. However, one has to put up with knaves or fools in this world. Which do you like best? . . . Red! Good God!”
He goes into another house, to enjoy more scents and sweetness, but here . . . horror . . . what are these things in pots? What are these THINGS IN POTS?
To us there may seem to be little wrong with them. We have seen better, perhaps. They appear to be somewhat stunted. Somewhat stunted indeed! They are wretched, they are deformed, they are miserable. And these are the flowers from which he was hoping great things, to whose beauty he had been looking forward, which to-morrow he was expecting proudly to display to an admiring rival, these these—these abortions! And they dare to shame him in his own greenhouse, to call themselves his flowers, to be second-rate, to be failures, to be rubbish in his garden! This time words, even his words, are inadequate. He is silent. But his eyes pop out of his head, his cheeks are suffused with crimson, and he dances in delirium like a dervish. Then there is a yell and up goes his stick. Crash! With one sweep five flower-pots are sent flying off the stand. Crash, crash, crash!
He waxes warm with the exercise. There were dozens of these flowers, row upon row of them, and petals and leaves and lumps of earth and fragments of pottery whizz and volley in all directions; till at last the stands are bare save for a confused litter, and he strides over the debris on the floor, out of breath, exhausted, spuffling and snorting, a purple devil of destruction, followed by a white-faced, trembling gardener.
From The Tribulations of a Baronet, by Timothy Eden (1933). Available on the Internet Archive: (Link).
I’m not too fond of red, either haha. I do love blue and yellow salvias. What a wonderful passage.