Homing instincts

Before artist and gardener Cedric Morris died, he had wisely appointed a plant executor to ensure his precious plants went to good homes. Without such foresight, many gems might have been lost, says Christopher Woodward, director of the Garden Museum in Lambeth

- Christopher Woodward

CEDRIC MORRIS was a modern Arcadian: that is, he lived for the present. In spring and summer, he painted and gardened at Benton End, in Hadleigh, Suffolk; each winter, he headed south to Mediterranean or African shores. Shortly before his death in 1982, at the age of 92, he tore up the photographs of himself taken in Man Ray’s studio in 1920s Paris, when his dancing with the socialite Duff Twysden—and his looks—made the clunky Ernest Hemingway jealous enough to mock Morris and his lifelong lover Arthur Lett-Haines—or ‘Lett’—in the night-club scene in The Sun Also Rises (1926).

Morris did not miss his beautiful youth. But he did care about what happened to the plants he had grown at Benton End, a Tudor house bought in 1940 to become an art school. Beth Chatto, his protégé, would compare the walled garden there to a ‘collector’s cabinet’.

At this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show, the Nurture Landscapes Garden has been designed by Sarah Price as an evocation of that lost garden. The bearded irises Morris bred in painterly colours will catch the eye first; Sarah Cook’s display of Benton irises —each named after a person or pet, such as Duff, Nigel (after his lover Nigel Scott) and Menace, a cat—was the sensation of the Marquee in 2015. But by a remarkable story of horticultural legacy, the garden will also re-unite many of the species plants that Morris collected on his winter trips.