The Roaring Dell

The Quantock Hills are where Lyrical Ballads was conceived and largely written.  In mid-May the landscape is enchanting, the tall woodland trees all shades of light green, showing branches still visible, dry leaves  and wild garlic underfoot. You hear the streams in the deep narrow ravines before you can see them. We walked from the famous waterfall at Holford steeply up to Alfoxden House, with wide views down to Kilve’s delightful shore and the sea beyond, with the long Welsh coast for horizon, and discovered a hidden, abandoned walled garden, warm in the sun.  

On the open moorland we met mares and foals strolling on the road, and drinking from Wordsworth’s muddy pond, not far from several aged thorns. 

Down in Nether Stowey we stayed in Tom Poole’s house where Coleridge spent the summer of 1807, and naturally we visited the cottage where he and Sara lived with their infant son Hartley and a succession of literary visitors, in uncommonly cramped quarters, from 1797-9. The National Trust has cleverly re-organised the undistinguished building to convey its original two-up, two-down arrangement, connected by a staircase within the chimneybreast, with a kitchen, yard, privy and well beyond, and a long rising garden, where Coleridge remained with a scalded foot, when the others walked to Holford, to

That roaring dell, o’er wooded, narrow, deep,

And only speckled by the mid-day sun;

Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock

Flings arching like a bridge; -that branchless ash,

Unsunn’d and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves

Ne’er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still

Fann’d by the waterfall! And there my friends

Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds

That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)

Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge

Of the blue clay-stone

 

Upstairs is the manuscript of a poem Poole wrote to

Coldridge! Youth of various powers:
I love to hear thy soul pour forth the line

To hear it sing of love and liberty,

As if fresh breathing from the hand divine

 In another room lie quills, ink and paper, for visitors to pen their own odes, which is a nice touch.

 

Italian Gardens Old and Modern 1

From In A Tuscan Garden, published anonymously 1902

“It is pleasant to have flowers growing in a garden.  I make this remark because there have always been many fine gardens without any flowers at all, in fact when the art of gardening reached its height, it took to despising its original material”

“We moderns have flowers but no gardens.”

“Gardens have nothing to do with Nature, or not much”

Vernon Lee

“Tidiness is one of the last gifts of civilization.  We now pride ourselves on our order  – we forget how very recent an accomplishment it is.”

‘The Soul of a People’. Henry Fielding

 Most of us have come under the spell of the charm of the old gardens in and about Rome, with their groves of cypress and ilex trees, their fountains and their statuary, all recalling the splendour of a bygone past, - delightful places in which to dream away the hot hours of the summer afternoons, to watch the sun slowly sinking, and flooding the desolate campagna with colour as it sets, or in which to sketch such favourite “bits” as we wish to have a memento of.  But I doubt if it has ever occurred to anyone to wish to possess – let us say, the garden of the Villa d’Este at Tivoli, or that of the Villa Lante near Viterbo, or, even the most fascinating of them all, the old garden on the Coelian, where St. Filippo Neri was wont to sit; and where to-day the villa to which it belongs is, during the greater part of the year, uninhabitable, owing to the malaria from the campagna below it.

None of these are gardens in the English sense  of the word, a place in which to plant and cultivate the flowers we love best.

The lovely gardens of North Italy, along the shores of the lakes, approach much more nearly to our English ideal.  The abundance of water in that district, joined to a climate much more temperate than that of Tuscany, make North Italy the real home of Italian gardening.   And yet, – I do not know if anyone else shares the feeling I always have in these beautiful spots, belonging now-a-days for the most part to small German royalties – they are show places, lovely to look at and enjoy as part of a holiday tour, but somehow not places intended to be lived in.  It is just the same feeling of want of reality that comes over one at the Riviera in spring, when life is seen under a kind of artificial condition, which you keep expecting will suddenly dissolve and melt away, carrying with it the crowd of idle men and women, the roba scarta of the London season.

The well-ordered English garden, beloved of its owners, and cultivated by them and their forefathers for generations, is not to be met with in Italy.

One has to live some time in Italy before fully comprehending that, in making comparisons, these must not be drawn between things English and things Italian, but between English and Tuscan, or Roman, or Neapolitan, or North Italian, as the case may be.   And when I say that a garden in the English sense of the word, and the gardening sentiment as it has existed for centuries in England, and of which the last thirty years has seen such an astonishing development, is not to be found here, I confine myself strictly to Tuscany.

A Tuscan garden is not a thing of beauty, or toe be cultivated for pleasure; it is a commercial asset of more or less value to the owner according to the different grades of the mezzaria system on which it is worked.

In many large gardens the  gardener is paid no wages, but is at liberty to make what he can by the sale of the plants and flowers it contains, only in that case it is stipulated that the owner’s house is furnished with what is required, according to the Italian standard.   Italians very much dislike our English habits of having plants, and especially of bringing cut flowers, into sitting-rooms, thinking them, particularly the latter, very unhealthy.

By far the greater part of the flowers grown for the market are made up on a stiff wooden foundation of one shape or another, either for presentation on fête days, or for funeral decorations (when they are de rigueur), or for exportation.

The  Vienna florists’ shops are mostly supplied from Tuscany, particularly in the matter of laurel and bay leaves, for the foundation of funeral wreaths.  The stripping of the trees that goes on here for this purpose is something that would not be credited unless one had seen it.  I have known the Magnolia grandiflora trees to be entirely stripped of their beautiful foliage, and standing bare and naked all the summer.  These leaves are packed in large sacks and sent by rail to Vienna.

The Seige of Calais

Cultural coincidence: in the same week a visit to Perry Green where this season the Henry Moore sculpture collection includes guests from the Musee Rodin, including the great Burghers of Calais, never very happily seen next to the Houses of Parliament, and rather incongruous there, given the English responsibility for their humiliation; and then the ETO production of Donizetti’s seldom-staged Siege of Calais, about the same event, which also occludes this dimension, casting the English army and king chiefly as a generic enemy of the brave citizens (and omitting or rather deleting the happy ending).  Both sculpture and opera celebrate heroic defeat  I don’t think there was any specific historical resonance for Donizetti, who apparently intended the work for the Paris Opera, though it premiered at the San Carlo in Naples, but the defeat both of the Carbonari and of Napoleon were fairly recent memories. For Rodin, perhaps the Franco-Prussian war and siege of Paris were background inspiration for his self-sacrificial Bourgeois.  An element of political reconciliation can also be inferred from the historical fact that the volunteer victims’ lives were in the end spared by intervention from Edward III’s queen Philippa.

Nathaniel Wells

A  wonderfully fine and warm bank holiday weekend, and a great walk in bluebell woodland along the cliffs of the river Wye near Chepstow, originally in the landscaped grounds of Piercefield House, a posh neo-classical mansion designed by Sir John Soane, built in the 1790s.  The estate was previously owned by the son of a planter from Antigua, who in the 1750s used his sugar and rum wealth to create an early example of picturesque landscaping, in the region where Picturesque tourism was hatched, with woodland walks, viewpoints on the beetling cliffs, a grotto, a ‘giants cave’, a ‘druid temple’, a gravity-fed fountain and a gentlemen’s bathing house by a cold spring.  All from the same impulse as the dramatic landscape at Hackfall in Yorkshire and its politer neighbour Studeley Royal, and all now in a  state of dereliction, including Piercefield House.  Which in 1802 was purchased by Nathaniel Wells, born in St Kitts, son of an enslaved mother Joardine and a Welsh-born planter, and educated in Britain as his father’s heir.  He  married successively the daughters of two Anglican clergymen, and two of his twenty children also became vicars.  Nathaniel was a rare example of someone of African ancestry and slave origins becoming  a prominent landowner, who undertook the customary local duties as magistrate, churchwarden, county sheriff etc, eventually holding office as deputy lieutenant of Monmouthshire.  The artist Joseph Farington in 1803 heard him described as ‘A West Indian of large fortune, a man of very gentlemanly manners, but so much a man of colour as to be little removed from a  Negro’ (manners and colour being evidently opposed qualities).   Perhaps such prejudice dissuaded Nathaniel from having his own portrait painted, as no likeness is known, though I like to think he is the fashionable gentleman in grey topper shown on left at back of the crowd at the Royal Academy in Cruikshank's Tom & Jerry 1821 illustration A Shilling Well Laid Out. 

On the customary Wye tour that autumn, Farington and friends walked along the clifftop and picnicked  'at the entrance of a subterranean passage cut through the rock' (the giants cave.)  “Not having knives and forks and glasses we sent to Pierce-field House and were furnished with them.”    They were joined by the head gardener, who said that the public days for viewing house and park were Wednesdays and Fridays but that he never knew Mr Wells refuse a written request.  Farington therefore wrote, but failed to take up the invitation, although he also spoke to a woman at the lodge, who “spoke most highly of the charitable and good disposition of Mr & Mrs Wells, and of Miss Wells, his sister.”  Farington, so keenly interested in racial appearance, added that Mr Wells “is a Creole of a very deep colour, but Miss Wells is fair.” 

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PS 

as plantation/slave owner, Wells was among those who received compensation in 1830s when slavery was abolished in Britain's Caribbean colonies  - a proportionate share of the £20million allocated by the government.  For more information, check out 

HOW AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT

BUILT BRITAIN

 The 1833 Abolition Act gave enslavers

 £20 million in compensation; enslaved

 Africans in the Caribbean got nothing!

About half of the compensation was paid directly to absentee holders in

Britain. They included over 100 MPs who sat in Parliament between 1820

and 1835; also included were more than 110 Church of England ministers.

They were identified in the records of the Compensation Commission

as either owners, trustees or executors. The compensation money,

the final pay-off to the enslavers, helped to build railways and country

mansions, to fund art collections, charities and to build modern Britain.

COME ALONG & HEAR

Dr. NICK DRAPER’S PRESENTATION on

‘HOW AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT BUILT BRITAIN’

LAMBETH TOWN HALL

London, Brixton Hill, SW2 1RW

 SATURDAY 18 MAY 2013 @ 3pm

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TO RESERVE SEATS, TEXT: 075 0890 3634

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Capitalist Pantomime

If you liked Clyborne Park, about social mobility in the US, and enjoyed Enron on the elaborate frauds of high finance, you ought to like  THE LOW ROAD by Clyborne’s Bruce Norris, billed as a ‘fable of free market economics and cut-throat capitalism’, and currently running at the Royal Court theatre.  Hardly a  fable (no moral conclusion) more a picaresque assemblage of satiric scenes on the theme of business history in the emerging US, with Adam Smith as guide, preaching self-interest as the beneficent engine of wealth creation through exploitation of individuals, whether by footpads or investment advisers.  The central character is a white entrepreneur, loosely based on Tom Jones with a nod to Candide, whose accountancy skills line his own pockets while fleecing others, but who also suffers the wheel of financial fortune. Fictive ancestor of a near-namesake, young Trumpett’s 18^th century tale is entwined with that of John Blanke, plucked from the plantation to be heir to an English earldom (don’t ask) before being re-enslaved, thus adding race to the mix.  The scenes tumble in an increasingly pantomimic manner, punctuated by dramatic explosions, as when Occupy-style protestors overwhelm a global free market conference or aliens descend in a spaceship.  If it’s all rather incoherent, then so is capitalist history, though sharper politics and a more Brechtian approach would have better served the energetic actors.

First Plantings 10

From In A Tuscan Garden, published anonymously 1902

The first of the five oblong beds, being the most sheltered, contains the more delicate teas; the second, just below it, has teas and tea hybrids; below that again, bed number three contains hybrid perpetuals in dark reds and crimsons.  Unless these last are picked in the early morning, they become discoloured after a very few hours of hot sunshine.  The fourth bed contains moss roses of many shades, from pure white to deep crimson; these are pegged down so as to entirely cover the bed.   This is by far the best way of growing the moss rose here, very few gardens have these, and I find they are always much appreciated.  The fifth bed is planted chiefly with pale pink and white tea, and tea hybrids; this is the bed with the wire fence (now completely covered with Gloire Lorraine and Kaiserin Augusta Victoria roses) which closes this division of the garden, and screens off a large brick pit I had made below the wall of the stanzone, on that side, in which our carnations are housed in cold weather. All these rose-beds are edged with small rough stones among which violets have been planted, forming a thick green border, and giving thousands of flowers for many months of the year, immediately within them are various narcissus and jonquils, and the beds themselves are carpeted between the roses with pansies, sown in the autumn, and planted out in December.  This autumn, finding that we had some yellow parrot tulips to spare, I planted them, with the purple Lord Beaconsfield pansies, in the first rose-bed, and hope for a good display in April.

The upper bed of these seven I kept for early double tulips.  At the back of it against the low wall, was a hedge of  “Cedrina” (sweet lemon-plant), and tall poles were inserted here, in order to fix wires, and carry them from one to the other, and then, across the court-yard, to the roof of the house. These are covered with roses, Fortune’s Yellow, and Camelliana (the Italian name for the old white Lamarque), and Saffrano.  The two last are the best winter flowering roses of the country.  Fortune’s Yellow is the earliest to flower, and in April this fence is a sheet of pink and gold. The only drawback to this rose is, that it does not bloom again in the autumn; but with so many that have a second flowering, that does not so much matter.  Wherever there was a tree-trunk, or a pole available, it was clothed with honeysuckle or climbing roses, and our newest plantings have been of wisteria, which we now have on either side of the west  borders, so as to form a pergola over the two rose hedges.

It must be understood that all this planting had to de done by degrees.   For several years I had very little to spend on the garden, and had to go adagio. In gardening, as in everything else in life, one has to buy one’s experience, and it is easy to see afterwards how much better many things might have been done. But, as regards the general laying out of the ground, I don’t know that I could alter or improve much, if at all, on the present distribution.  The ground is by no means ideal, but one has to do the best possible with the material at hand. If I could cut out the undergrowth of the old shrubbery, here and there, we might have lovely sowings of poppies, delphiniums, larkspurs, lupins, and such-like things, in true English fashion. But one must take the goods the gods provide, and to have the full liberty of all the beautiful park and garden and podere, out of which we get infinitely more enjoyment than their proprietor does, in addition to our own flower-patches, is a piece of good fortune for which we are duly thankful.

EPSTEIN

 

Sculpture is notoriously hard to photograph or even film – though possibly it works with 3D technology – and it’s sometimes almost as difficult to display well. With their familiar proportions, portrait busts ought to be relatively easy to install and light, but I’m not a great fan of the NPG’s permanent displays, with heads against the wall, or in central clusters.  So the temporary exhibition on the half-landing of busts by Jacob Epstein is a visual delight that invites the viewer to move between and around the heads, observing all the sculptor’s skill in modelling features, surfaces, textures and mass, to give the works compelling presence.

Very notably, the commanding bust of Ramsay Macdonald, whose appearance in other portraits, photos and film footage often suggests shambling indecision, is here endowed with confidence, maturity, energy, indicating how tragic his final failure of leadership may have been.  That of Nehru, on a smaller scale, suggests inner depth and weight of care under necessary inscrutability.  Epstein did not know these sitters intimately, and his rendering of their expressions does not depend on any knowledge of their history or emotions, yet it powerfully conveys individual personality, often more vividly than through painting or drawing.   As Michael Caines notes of the NPG group, the viewer has the 'weird sensation' of being able to look the sitters in the eye, although equally unnerving is the fact that they don't look back, nor do they have have the blind stare common to sculpted busts.  Epstein's rough surfaces convey a most convincing equivalent to 'live' faces and fabrics.