Cecil Beaton wore many outlandish hats in his time. He was a photographer of high society, including royalty, as well as war. He designed sets and costumes for theatre, ballet and film. He was a writer, illustrator, painter and interior designer. He was decadent, boho, astute, difficult and brilliant.
But can you really see him weeding? Well, welcome to my rose-laden arbour, as he might have said. A new exhibition at the Garden Museum in London is the first to give us Beaton the gardener — in a still stylish straw gardening hat (on display). He’s out in the midday sun, if not weeding and planting, then dreaming up extravagant beds of flowers of all sizes and colours, although his favourites were white.
Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party captures some of that era’s decadent lusciousness, although it is inevitably hamstrung by the impracticality of filling a relatively small space with the endless, huge fresh-flower creations Beaton loved so much. Instead, the designer Luke Edward Hall has festooned the displays with pretty white fabric lilies, which appear here and there throughout, and illustrated the rooms with charming drawings based on Beaton’s own.
Note that it’s a party, so not strictly speaking about any one garden. As these things go it’s rather starry — think Met Gala, but much more flowerful. We meet his decadent crowd of Bright Young Things in the 1920s. Salvador Dalí makes an appearance, sourcing a rabbit masque to be worn with a rose-laden coat (which also featured broken eggshells, of course). There are sumptuous photographs of of Wallis Simpson and the (at the time) new Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother), a tricky series of assignments that must have taken every bit of diplomacy in Beaton to pull off.
“My garden is the greatest joy of my life, after my friends. Both are worth living for,” Beaton declared in 1979, a year before his death. We have more garden here than friends, although Roy Strong has written a warm introduction to the catalogue in which he notes: “Hugo Vickers, his distinguished biographer, told me that I was one of the very few people into whom he never plunged a dagger in his diaries.” Beaton’s tongue was as sharp as a rose thorn: he called Katharine Hepburn, for instance, a “rotten ingrained viper”. I’m not sure sending any number of flower arrangements would have made up for that.
But back to the party. Hepburn may not have been invited, but plenty of others are. It’s being held at Reddish, his house in Broad Chalke, Wiltshire, where he lived from 1947 to his death. Here he created a water garden (with a trout stream and a lake with an island) and a cutting garden with billows of roses, peonies, irises. He gave the house a “flower room” filled with vases and baskets.
His ingenious “winter garden” sun room had a Moorish pond in the shape of a quatrefoil, with cusped edges and a bamboo trellis suspended from the ceiling to support climbers. It had a distinct jungle feel, heavily scented with jasmine.
• This Cecil Beaton exhibition is a floral sensation
The curator, Emma House, has concentrated on showing how plants and flowers were woven into every Beaton design. We also get to meet Bianca Jagger, David Hockney, Penelope Tree and David Bailey. Don’t forget Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. Audrey Hepburn wouldn’t have missed it. The final guest is Oscar. You know, the golden man statue. All in all, quite the crowd.
To Sep 21
Six more artists’ gardens to visit
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Little Sparta, South Lanarkshire
The poet Ian Hamilton Finlay considered his garden at Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh, to be his greatest work of art. He and his wife, Sue, moved there in 1966 and over the years, until his death in 2006, worked to create a garden with an extraordinary series of artworks including “poem objects”. Finlay, a proponent of “concrete poetry’, where word placement and typography are as important as verse, “planted” poems, if not in concrete, then in materials like granite and slate, as well as across streams and in trees. The seven-acre plot, which includes temples and statues, can be seen as a modern philosopher’s garden, with themes including revolution, sea and fishing fleets, classic antiquity and the Second World War. But there were more practical issues too. “Life is full of problems,” he wrote to the Austrian poet Ernst Jandl in 1967. “Not least the moles, which can RUIN a good garden-poem overnight.”
Open Jun to Sep
• Who was Ian Hamilton Finlay? — Scotland’s greatest (unknown) artist
The Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, St Ives, Cornwall
The sculptor Barbara Hepworth bought Trewyn Studio and the attached garden in St Ives in 1949 and lived and worked there until her death in 1975. She always saw the garden as a “working” one and there are extraordinary photographs of her in it — standing on scaffolding, hammer and chisel in hand — sculpting a monumental piece against a backdrop of palm trees, the St Ives skyline and the sea beyond.
The garden, which is just under an acre, was designed with an eye to showcasing her work, with views and vistas created by trees and architectural plants that she planted. The garden, she said, had a “sort of magic” and her lush subtropical planting and trees (pear, cherry, ginkgo, copper beech, magnolia) combine to create a secluded, calm atmosphere. Hepworth gave her studio and garden to the nation after her death and it has been in the care of the Tate gallery since 1980.
Open daily except Dec 24–26
• Carving her mark: the life and art of Barbara Hepworth
Derek Jarman, Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, Kent
Jarman, a film-maker, artist and activist, spotted Prospect Cottage in 1986 when he was filming on the beach at Dungeness with the actress Tilda Swinton. He had already decided, after finding out he was HIV positive, that he wanted an escape from London life, and in 1987 did just that, buying the cottage, with its distinctive black walls and bright yellow window frames, in the otherworldly landscape of the Kent coast.
He admitted it was a crazy place for a garden: flat, arid, shingle soil, a wind that blew constantly. There was also a nuclear plant (and miniature railway) just behind him. He planted what grew naturally — sea kale, broom, lavender and santolina. There were self-seeding bright orange California poppies and the garden was also full of stone circles, rusted metal and surprising sculptures. Jarman died in 1994 and since then the garden at Prospect Cottage has become a place of pilgrimage, free to visit.
Open daily
• A rare glimpse inside Derek Jarman’s Dungeness beach cottage
Vita Sackville-West, Sissinghurst Castle Garden, Kent
“The thing to remember about this garden,” Vita Sackville-West wrote in 1950 in House & Garden magazine, “is that 20 years ago, in 1930, there was no garden.” The place had been on the market for three years, the buildings occupied by farm labourers. “The slum-like effect, produced by both man and Nature, was squalid to a degree.” It took three years to clear the land. This was exhausting, but also allowed Vita and her husband, Harold Nicolson, to get a “feel” for the place. Nicolson was more the designer, Sackville-West the plantswoman.
She writes with exultation about the yew hedges that were planted. “They were the whole pattern and design and anatomy of the garden.” They are still there, guiding us round. The planting is intimate yet theatrical, creating distinct spaces (including the gorgeous White Garden) that fit together like a jigsaw. Sackville-West was a poet and novelist, but she also wrote beautifully about gardens. Here is her ruminating about Sissinghurst: “One needs years of patience to make a garden; one needs deeply to love it, in order to endure that patience. One needs optimism and foresight. One has to wait.” After her death in 1962, the garden was given to the National Trust, but when you visit you can still get that “feel” that is Sissinghurst.
Open daily
• Vita Sackville-West’s White Garden is the perfect spot for inspiration
Claude Monet, Giverny, France
Monet first saw the little village of Giverny (which at the time had a population 279) on a train and, legend has it, fell in love. In 1883 he moved there with his family, to the Maison du Pressoir, the unforgettable pink house with green shutters. The garden he created is now famous in reality and in art. The pond, with its Japanese bridge and willow banks, inspired his waterlilies, the first of which he painted in the 1890s. He would create 250 waterlily paintings before his death in 1926. The garden is a sumptuous series of scenes that could themselves be paintings and has become a tourist “must do”, but has managed to retain that sense of artful, bountiful beauty.
Open Apr-Nov
• Show me the Monet! How gallery gift shops cash in
Jardin Majorelle, Marrakesh, Morocco
This garden, saved from being developed into a hotel by the fashion designers Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé in the 1980s, was the life work of the French painter Jacques Majorelle, who moved here in the 1920s. It is best known for its incredible use of colour in the buildings and hard landscaping, especially the zingy cobalt blue that is so distinctive it is now known as “Majorelle blue”. The two-acre garden, created over 40 years, is luxuriant in scope and aspiration, a labyrinth of paths and levels, a festival of opulence with a huge array of exotic plants and trees. It is among the biggest tourist attractions in Marrakesh, so you won’t find too much peace and quiet here (although you could try by going early and beating the crowds).
Open daily
