Do gardens always contain their own ghosts? Isn’t that part of their cyclical nature, that plants grow and die back seasonally? So that every garden is imprinted with traces of its earlier selves, like a palimpsest. In her gold medal-winning ‘Nurture Landscapes’ show garden at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show, Sarah Price has cultivated a space with the etherealness and hazy romance of a memory, which is also strikingly tactile, crafted from a sustainable materials palette that is totally future-facing.
The remembered place is the painter-plantsman Cedric Morris’s garden at Benton End in Suffolk. Morris and his partner, fellow artist Arthur Lett-Haines, moved to the large, ramshackle Tudor manor house in 1940, after a fire destroyed their previous home. The alternative, informal East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing that they’d founded there in 1937 moved with them (one apocryphal story recounts that, on seeing the building in flames, Morris instructed his students to get out their brushes and paint the scene).
At Benton End’s long refectory table, over meals cooked by Lett-Haines, students mingled with a roll call of illustrious guests, from Vita Sackville-West to Elizabeth David, Beth Chatto, Francis Bacon, Benjamin Britton and Peter Pears. In the febrile haute-bohemia of the house, artistic creativity and liberal social attitudes thrived while, outside, Cedric set about transforming the three and a half acres of overgrown gardens into a treasure trove with plants he bought, bred, was gifted and collected on his frequent over-wintering excursions around the Mediterranean. Most notably, he became a prolific, passionate breeder of irises, which he admired for their ‘elegance, pride and delicacy’ and frequently rendered in painted splendour.
‘What’s amazing, looking through archival photographs, is to see how dynamic the garden was, how much [Morris] changed it,’ Price tells me. The first thing he created was an ample vegetable garden to supply Lett-Haines’s kitchen. Then, he set about forming herbaceous borders. ‘But, looking at archival photographs you can see that it was quite wild with different plants he brought back from Europe, with giant fennel and foxtail lilies erupting out of the beds.’
It was wilder still when Price first visited Benton End, five years ago. After Morris died, in 1982, the contents of his garden were entrusted to his friend and fellow gardener Jenny Robinson, and dispersed to friends and enthusiasts. The house was bought and sold several times, before ultimately coming into the custodianship of the Garden Museum, the result of a very generous gift. All that remained of the garden was the bones, ‘two towering pines and these very low, quite scrubby, arching Elaeagnus “Quicksilver”’. Beneath them, bulbs that had naturalised pushed up through the unkempt grass ‘like a Medieval mead tapestry.’ Sarah Cook, former head gardener at Sissinghurst, who has dedicated much of the past 20 years to re-gathering the Benton irises, calls these ‘Cedric’s ghosts’. ‘That was the spirit I wanted to capture,’ Price explains.
At Chelsea, the irises are the first things that catch your eye. Swathes of ‘Benton Olive’, tall and poised, their curdled-gold standards cupped upwards as though holding something very precious and their lilac-stained falls billowing. They run like gilded threads through the garden. They take the breath away. There are others here, too – nine cultivars in total, ranging from the drowningly deep purple-blue of ‘Benton Nigel’, to the plum tones of ‘Benton Menace’ and the opaline white of ‘Benton Pearl’. ‘When you see plants growing in their species form, there is a real elegance,’ Price explains. ‘And I’ve always been drawn to species that aren’t overbred. I think Cedric looked at that pure form and just exaggerated it a little bit here and brought out the colour there, and that is enchanting.’ Generally prefixed by ‘Benton’, Morris’s 90 named irises are tributes to friends (nurserywoman Olive Murrell), lovers (gardener and poet Nigel Scott) and, occasionally, pets (Menace the cat).
Price, taking inspiration from Morris’s paintings as much as his garden, combines irises with Mediterranean plants, such as succulents and aloes, in a landscape the honeyed hues of sunbaked earth. A subtle palette of greens and silvers – feathery fennel and sculptural Angelica archangelica; Salvia sclarea; Euphorbia; the most beautiful poppy, oyster-shell grey, (Papaver rhoeas “Mother of Pearl”, a Morris cultivar); several elegant Elaeagnus “Quicksilver” – is set against desert-toned, rose-trailed walls. Made from canvas backdrops recovered from a film studio and coloured with pigments derived from construction rubble, as well as straw bales bound in lime render, these walls are one of several material innovations by the Sussex-based studio Local Works, which make this garden one of the most sustainable Chelsea show gardens ever. Elsewhere, planters and vessels have been moulded in holes dug from the ground using a waste aggregate and a low-carbon cement binder, a by-product of the steel industry. A perimeter rope has been woven from hops. Nothing is entirely new here; everything has had a past life.
Something else I noted: there’s a lot of ground on show. It’s a crucial part of this composition. Price, like the painter she originally trained as, understands that, in any arrangement, it is the interval between things that gives them meaning. (As in the Japanese concept of Ma, so crucial to ikebana – an art form that doesn’t feel like too distant a reference here.) Negative space is generative, especially in a garden. Not only in aesthetic terms, but in practical ones. Irises, for instance, need room. Their rhizomes sit on top of the soil and suffer from crowding or competition. And space is never ‘empty’, but filled with fauna as well as flora above and below ground. This spaciousness gives a the garden a great feeling of freedom, of (surely hard-won) effortlessness, of breath. The garden, in one sense, takes place in the interval between two large pines at either end of the plot, each offering shade to a nearby table. Places to pause or to gather. I could have stayed all day.
The RHS Chelsea Flower Show runs at Royal Hospital Chelsea, SW3 London until Saturday 27 May. Details: rhs.org.uk
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