Replanting Benton End with Cedric Morris’ iconic flowers

It’s been a creative process throughout, we’ve created a subtle sense of enclosure to the huge old clumps of Yucca gloriosa; with a low feature wall which will soak in the summer heat. Whilst currently, attention is on the creation of a rill which will transport rainwater from the house roof downpipes in to a reinterpretation of Cedric Morris’ pond. As autumnal afternoon hours shorten, still amidst the beep beep of a dumper truck reserving, and the thud thud of mallets tamping down bricks, I am beginning to sense the finish line approaching.

But of course this is only half of the making, what remains, luckily for me, is the opportunity to bring back the plants which made Cedric’s garden so exciting to gardeners and creatives of his day. Beth Chatto’s stand out remark on the garden is never far from my thinking: “a bewildering, mind-stretching, eye-widening canvas of colour, texture and shapes, created primarily with bulbous and herbaceous plants. Later I came to realise it was probably the finest collection of such plants in the country.” How mouthwatering an opportunity we have ahead of us…

Together with his portraits and landscapes, Cedric painted brilliant still life compositions, many were a blaze of flowers in a vase. In composing his subject before him, it is said that he did not arrange the stems but cared that they would appear natural, not forced. This naturalistic style was entirely of his garden, he was such a skilled observer of nature that he knew the twists and turns of a flowering stem as it jostled for the limelight. Over the past year I have been working on a vast breakdown of the component plants which are key to evoking the spirit of Cedric Morris as a plantsman. It’s now time to begin tucking these into the Benton End loam, ready for their awakening next spring.

Irises are most certainly the most iconic flower of Cedric Morris’ oeuvre, and as we amass them and establish our collection their flowering will henceforth create a peak moment for the garden. Yet our ambition is to have many layers to the planting to represent Cedric as the broad plantsman he was, so to have a succession of peak moments before and after the early summer time of year when the irises flower.

Perhaps second to irises are poppies and more generally Cedric’s love for bowl shaped flowers, similarly wild roses with their central boss much like an eye. He loved to paint a flower with a defining feature, like the glaucous foliage of a opium poppy, with it’s crinkled texture; or an iris with plicata (veining to it’s petals); or Turk’s cap lilies with their dynamic reflexed petals.

In the garden, both lilies and poppies can be easily integrated. Firstly, lilies are a long lived bulb which don’t move around but occupy a permanent spot. Their slender stem grows bolt upright and therefore they can be an additional insert between more spreading plants. Entirely different are poppies, most of which are annuals and very quick growing from seed, they will move around the garden and pop up in thousands of different spots year after year. We’re growing unusual poppies like the tangerine flowered Papaver triniifolium and a relatively new to cultivation black petalled poppy called Papaver macrostomum, as well as bulking up the perennial Papaver orientale ‘Cedric Morris’, which the team at Beth Chatto gifted us. They have been so generous in giving us plants Beth originally received from Cedric several decades ago.

Just this week I have planted out a specimen of the chestnut rose (Rosa roxburghii) which I’ve grown at Benton End from seed given to me by Frances Mount who gardened for Cedric during the 1970s, and continues to live nearby. Her recollection of the roses in the garden has been very insightful. She annotated a catalogue which was compiled by botanist Jim Bingley. This documents over 700 different plants which were present at the time of recording. It is an invaluable botanical record of what grew in the walled garden and wonderfully polar opposite to the detection work required when identifying the plants within Cedric’s flower paintings.

During the garden’s heyday in the early 1950’s, Vita Sackville-West was a guest, and Cedric’s irises were exchanged for rose cuttings from Sissinghurst’s marvellous collection. Photographs from 1991 show tens of freestanding shrub roses dotted around the walled garden. Whilst uncovering the garden in the past 2 years, several long established ones have been found. The most choice being Rosa webbiana which stands firmly in the walled garden, still in good health even though potentially 60 years old. It has dainty foliage and the most elegant soft pink flowers, it’s fast become a favourite of mine.

Together with wild roses, the walled garden was rich in old roses via Sissinghurst. I’d love to bring back the best of these as they will add purple and magenta to the colour palette. An old shrub of the moss rose ‘William Lobb’ was still proving vigorous amongst the bird seeded elderberries in the front garden when I began, I’ve since had to clear this area to make way for many nursery tables. Other roses I look to bring are the late summer flowering Rosa moschata ‘Autumnalis’, spring flowering Rosa x cantabrigiensis and Rosa chinensis ‘Bengal Crimson’, which is rarely not in flower throughout the entire year.

Over the next six months, I’ll be accompanied by Sarah Byham, this years Benton End WRAGS (Work to Retrain as a Gardener Scheme) trainee whom we are thankful to be keeping on for the next year, as our Rick Mather Gardener, generously supported by the Rick Mather David Scrase Foundation. We’ll also be joined by our next WRAGS trainee Sybille de Cussy, who is joining us after a six month stint at Beth Chatto’s Garden. We’ll be planting hundreds of seedlings which we’ve raised ourselves, either from seed collected from repatriated plants or bought afresh. Alongside these, I have scheduled all the plants we need to procure to complete the picture.

–

Thinking of supporting our appeal to restore the gardens at Benton End? From 2-9 December, we will be taking part in the Big Give’s Christmas Challenge. This means any amount you donate during the challenge campaign will be doubled, as it’s matched pound for pound by the Big Give! 

Find out more about our Benton End Big Give Campaign.