The Benton End Big Give Christmas Challenge

For one week only, every donation you make will be matched pound for pound, meaning your gift will go twice as far in helping us revive Cedric Morris’ walled garden in Suffolk. With your help, we will renew the walled garden at Benton End to re-open it for all as a place of art and horticulture, learning and friendship.

About Benton End

In the 1950s the artist and horticulturalist Cedric Morris created a ‘paradise of pollen and paint’ within the old walls of Benton End, a Tudor manor house in Hadleigh, Suffolk, which he and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines had converted into a radical art school. It was the first naturalistic garden in Britain, with rare plants from Morris’s travels to the Mediterranean and beyond woven between bursts of the irises whose colours he mixed like paint.

Morris died in 1982. The art school became a private dwelling, and the garden was abandoned. In 2021 Benton End was majority gifted to the Garden Museum by Rob and Bridget Pinchbeck via the Pinchbeck Charitable Trust, with a clear plan in mind: that it re-open once again as a place of art and horticultural education.

Campaign Aims 

With your help, we will:

• Bring new life to a nationally important British garden. The walled garden will be re-shaped and landscaped, accessible paths laid, gates hung, walls repaired and painted, benches made, planting completed, and the pond restored. 

• Ensure the garden is accessible to all. All visitors, including those with additional needs and disabilities, will feel welcome, and able to enjoy the garden independently and at ease. 

• Maintain the biodiversity of the garden. The garden will be maintained as a chemical-free garden, as it was in Cedric’s time, and will support a wide range of bird and insect species that have flourished while the garden has been left to grow wild, including 5 new species new to Suffolk. 

With thanks to our pledgers, the Bedford Family and champions,  Reed Educational Trust Limited