IN the early 1900s, the Bloomsbury district of west London was a hub for a bohemian circle of writers, artists and philosophers who would enrich our cultural and intellectual heritage. Although they became known as the Bloomsbury Group, much of their creative impulse came from the time they spent far from London, in the verdant gardens of their country homes. A new exhibition opening this month at London's Garden Museum puts a spotlight on four of these gardens and their female owners, displaying paintings, photographs, textiles, correspondence and even garden tools to tell their interwoven stories.
'A dream of what England had once been'
When writer and garden designer Vita Sackville-West moved to Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, the moated Elizabethan manor was in ruins and its gardens, which stretched out over woods, streams and farmland, were, she wrote, 'crying out for rescue'. A Gallica rose was one of the few specimens to survive the dilapidation and became a motif for a lost Eden that she hoped to re-create by trailing her beloved old roses around apple trees and designing, in partnership with her husband, the writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson, an abundant rose garden that typified her 'cram, cram, cram' landscaping strategy. Her vision for Sissinghurst, wrote her grandson Adam Nicolson in 2018, was 'deeply nostalgic and retrospective, a dream of what England had once been'.
Sissinghurst's disjointed buildings forced an intimacy with the garden and SackvilleWest traversed it at all hours and in all weathers as she moved between meals, work and bed the celebrated White Garden, with its piles of white pompom dahlias, tulips, gladioli and irises, doubtless offering welcome luminosity at night. With her husband's precise planning and her know-how, the grounds were transformed into one of England's most admired gardens, which she enjoyed surveying from her study in the tower.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der May 08, 2024-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
