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Benton End is a Grade II* listed [1] sixteenth-century house located on the outskirts of the market town of Hadleigh in Suffolk, England. From 1939 to 1982 it was home to the artist Cedric Morris, who ran the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in the house, and in the garden grew a significant botanical collection.
Benton End is thought to have been built in the 1520s. The first documented inhabitant was Robert Rolfe, a cloth merchant and "chief inhabitant" of Hadleigh. [2] Although later alterations have seen the house partly plastered and bay windows added, the original late-medieval timber structure with brick nogging remains intact and visible in parts of the house, including the current main entrance. [3] The Architect responsible for the interior features is thought to be Sir Peter Cheyney. [1]
Cedric Morris and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines acquired Benton End in 1939 after fire destroyed the previous site of their art school in Dedham, Essex. [6] Benton End afforded space for Morris, Lett-Haines and many of their students to live as well as work at the school. This contributed to the communal atmosphere and encouraged its laissez-faire but inspiring approach to learning. Jon Lys Turner's biography of the illustrator Richard Chopping and his partner Denis Wirth-Miller, both alumni of the East Anglian School, characterises it as
a place for the free exchange of artistic ideas and techniques. The school was anti-hierarchical as well as anti-patriarchal, with little in the way of structure or rules, and provided a setting for sexual as well as artistic liberation.
[7] While Morris focused on the students' work, Lett-Haines was in charge of the school's administration as well as cooking two meals a day. Thanks to Morris' work in the vegetable garden and Lett-Haines' enthusiasm for cooking, the community at Benton End did not experience hardships on the scale of wartime London – indeed, according to Lys Turner, the war years were "markedly hedonistic".
Through the 1940s and 1950s Benton End became the centre of a diverse community of twentieth-century artists, writers and horticulturalists. [6] Among the students was Lucian Freud, who was a favourite of Morris and Lett-Haines despite his waywardness. [7] Freud called Morris' portraits "revealing in a way that is almost improper", leading commentators to view Morris as a significant influence on Freud's style. [8] Friends and visitors included the painters John Nash and Francis Bacon and the writers Ronald Blythe and Stephen Spender. Blythe described the atmosphere of Benton End as "robust and coarse, and exquisite and tentative all at once. Rough and ready and fine mannered. Also faintly dangerous." [9] The illustrator Kathleen Hale, who wrote the Orlando the Marmalade Cat series, was also a frequent visitor to Benton End, as Lett-Haines' lover and as a friend and informal pupil of Morris. [7]
Morris grew rare and exotic plants at Benton End, which he collected on expeditions to the Mediterranean and North Africa and in many cases introduced to cultivation in Britain for the first time. [10] He planted them in an idiosyncratic style which admirers have viewed as an extension of his work as a painter: Beth Chatto described the garden as a "bewildering, mind-stretching, eye-widening canvas of colour, textures and shapes". [11] He was most prolific as a cultivator of irises; he grew around 1,000 varieties, and bred up to 90 cultivars of his own. [12] [13] His rose Rosa 'Sir Cedric Morris' and poppy Papaver orientale 'Cedric Morris' are both widely commercially available.
The garden Morris created, and the plants he grew, influenced many important figures in British horticulture. Constance Spry displayed rhubarb from his garden in her London shop, [14] and Vita Sackville-West, a frequent visitor to Benton End, grew his irises at Sissinghurst. [13] Most significantly, Morris became a mentor to Beth Chatto, who said that a large proportion of the plants in her gardens came from Benton End. [11]
Sarah Cook, a former head gardener at Sissinghurst, who grew up in Hadleigh, is leading a project to track down, preserve and record all Cedric Morris's surviving introductions. Many of these were distributed to other horticulturalists after Morris' death by Jenny Robinson, whom Morris appointed as his horticultural executor. In 2015 Sarah Cook showed 25 Cedric Morris irises at the Chelsea Flower Show. [13]
The house was acquired by the Pinchbeck Charitable Trust in 2018, with the aim of restoring Morris' garden and establishing the house as an education centre in art and horticulture, as well as a memorial to Morris. [15] In 2021 the house was gifted to the Garden Museum, London and leased to the newly formed the Benton End House and Garden Trust for restoration of the garden and an inclusive centre for art and gardening. [16] [17]
The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), founded in 1804 as the Horticultural Society of London, is the UK's leading gardening charity.
Hadleigh is an ancient market town and civil parish in South Suffolk, East Anglia, situated, next to the River Brett, between the larger towns of Sudbury and Ipswich. It had a population of 8,253 at the 2011 census. The headquarters of Babergh District Council were located in the town until 2017.
Sissinghurst Castle Garden, at Sissinghurst in the Weald of Kent in England, was created by Vita Sackville-West, poet and writer, and her husband Harold Nicolson, author and diplomat. It is among the most famous gardens in England and is designated Grade I on Historic England's register of historic parks and gardens. It was bought by Sackville-West in 1930, and over the next thirty years, working with, and later succeeded by, a series of notable head gardeners, she and Nicolson transformed a farmstead of "squalor and slovenly disorder" into one of the world's most influential gardens. Following Sackville-West's death in 1962, the estate was donated to the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. It is one of the Trust's most popular properties, with nearly 200,000 visitors in 2017.
A plantsman is an enthusiastic and knowledgeable gardener, nurseryman or nurserywoman. "Plantsman" can refer to a male or female person, though the terms plantswoman, or even plantsperson, are sometimes used. The word is sometimes said to be synonymous with "botanist" or "horticulturist", but that would indicate a professional involvement, whereas "plantsman" reflects an attitude to plants. A horticulturist may be a plantsman, but a plantsman is not necessarily a horticulturist.
The Victoria Medal of Honour (VMH) is awarded to British horticulturists resident in the United Kingdom whom the Royal Horticultural Society Council considers deserving of special honour by the Society.
Andromeda Botanic Gardens is a 6-acre (2.4 ha) botanical garden and an historic cultural attraction in the village of Bathsheba, Saint Joseph in Barbados. It is an authentic garden created by multiple award-winning horticulturalist Iris Bannochie, a female, Barbadian, self-taught scientist. It is unique, having been created from the 1950s as both a private botanical garden and a pleasure garden by an individual. Named from the Greek mythological figure of Andromeda it started as a private plant collection around Ms Bannochie's home, who was also the leading expert on horticulture on the island. Ms Bannochie wrote various academic papers from topics including the lifecycle of the whistling frog, and the vitamin C content of the Barbadian cherry. She was a mentor to many and considered the queen of Barbadian horticulture. At one point, she was responsible for introducing over 80% of the ornamental plants found in Barbados.
Ronald George Blythe is an English writer, essayist and editor, best known for his work Akenfield (1969), an account of agricultural life in Suffolk from the turn of the century to the 1960s. He wrote a long-running and considerably praised weekly column in the Church Times entitled "Word from Wormingford".
Sir Cedric Lockwood Morris, 9th Baronet was a British artist, art teacher and plantsman. He was born in Swansea in South Wales, but worked mainly in East Anglia. As an artist he is best known for his portraits, flower paintings and landscapes.
Beth Chatto was an English plantswoman, garden designer and author known for creating and describing the Beth Chatto Gardens near Elmstead Market in the English county of Essex. She wrote several books about gardening under specific conditions and lectured on this in Britain, North America, Australia, the Netherlands and Germany. Her principle of placing the right plant in the right place drew on her husband Andrew Chatto's lifelong research into garden-plant origins.
Arthur Lett-Haines, known as Lett Haines, was a British painter and sculptor who experimented in many different media, though he generally characterised himself as "an English surrealist". He was part of a London artistic circle, which included D. H. Lawrence, the Sitwells and Wyndham Lewis, but for most of his life lived with the painter and gardener Cedric Morris in Cornwall, Paris and finally Suffolk.
The East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing was an art learning environment established by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines in East Anglia in 1937. It was run on very idiosyncratic lines based upon the "free rein" approach that was then current in French academies. It had a great influence on many Suffolk artists and made an important contribution to art teaching in the east of England for forty years.
Bettina Shaw-Lawrence, also known as Betty Shaw-Lawrence, was an English figurative artist. Shaw studied painting and drawing under Fernand Léger, Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, though she was mainly self-taught and worked professionally until the early 1980s.
Edward Augustus Bowles was a British horticulturalist, plantsman and garden writer. He developed an important garden at Myddelton House, his lifelong home at Bulls Cross in Enfield, Middlesex and his name has been preserved in many varieties of plant. The standard author abbreviation Bowles is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
John Caspar Wister was one of the United States' most highly honored horticulturists.
Colchester Art Society was founded in 1946 by a group of artists who lived in Colchester and the nearby areas, many of whom were also linked to the Colchester School of Art, which is part of Colchester Institute. The aim of the society was and still is the promotion of the visual arts.
Pamela Schwerdt was the joint head gardener at Sissinghurst Castle Garden from 1959 to 1990, and a pioneering horticulturalist.
Catherine Horwood is an English journalist, author and social historian who writes extensively on horticulture, garden design, and in fashion, the history of dress. She is the authorised biographer of the British plantswoman, garden designer, and author, Beth Chatto. Her biography, Beth Chatto: a life with plants won the European Garden Book of the Year award in 2020.
Denise Broadley was a British painter and artist.
Cherryl Angela Fountain is an English still life, landscape and botanical artist. As the daughter of a gamekeeper and a resident of rural east Kent, much of her work reflects an environment of farming, botanical gardens and country life. Her work has been accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition on twenty-eight occasions, and she has received bursaries and numerous awards in honour of her work.
Eva Lucy Harwood was a British artist known for her landscape paintings of East Anglia and Suffolk.
Coordinates: 52°02′00″N0°57′47″E / 52.03334°N 0.96299°E
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