Country Life Magazine | Planting Diaries

Florence Dunbar Tending the Garden, 1939. All images courtesy Liss Llewellyn Gallery (unless otherwise stated)

Lately, the lengthening April days have been cold and overcast, punctuated with occasional welcome bursts of sunshine. This moment, before the warmth of spring finally arrives, is captured expertly by Evelyn Dunbar in a series of paintings of gardens, mostly belonging to members of her family in Kent and East Sussex. With trees bare of leaves and the soil freshly turned ready to receive new crops, the chill in the air is perceptible.

Dunbar chose these semi-rural allotment gardens as her subjects, showing a preference for vernacular gardens rather than those attached to grand houses and designed to impress. These practical spaces were a familiar sight in the 1930s and beyond, and had a special style of their own, running in parallel to ever-changing garden fashions. Dominated by large fruit trees, and under-planted with vegetable crops, these productive gardens were necessary as a response to war time food shortages, but also speak of pre-supermarket days when fresh produce was not so easily available.

In ‘Florence Dunbar Tending the Garden’ (1939) an apple tree bursts into flower, the clotted texture of the paint suggesting the abundance of blossom, (and recalling Samuel Palmer’s ‘In a Shoreham Garden’). Strawberry Cottage in Hurst Green, East Sussex belonged to Dunbar’s aunt and ‘Vegetable Garden at Strawberry Cottage’ (1938) shows rows of tiny seedlings starting to emerge with a row of beans (or peas) starting to climb their simple wooden supports. A more conventional approach might show these gardens in the height of summer, but Dunbar chooses the very start of the season and we share the anticipation of flowers and fruit to come.

A Sussex Garden, 1939

Basement Garden, 1937

Vegetable Garden at Strawberry Cottage, 1938

Early spring, c. 1936

In recent years there’s been a revival of interest in the painter Evelyn Dunbar (1906 – 1960) after a retrospective show at the Pallant House Gallery in 2015, giving a new generation an opportunity to re-discover an artist who had been largely forgotten after her death in 1960 at the age of 53. This show came about after a relative of the artist took a painting by Dunbar to the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow. After this, a large quantity of Dunbar’s sketches and drawings came to light, some relating to her best known work as a war artist.

Born in Rochester, Kent Dunbar attended Rochester School of Art (1925 – 27) and Chelsea School of Art (1927 – 29), followed by Royal College of Art where she studied until 1933. There she formed a close relationship with her tutor, Charles (Cyril) Mahoney (1903 – 1968), who used domestic gardens as a source of inspiration in his painting. She worked with him on various projects during the 1930s including a mural for the assembly hall at Brockley County School for Boys in south east London and Gardeners’ Choice, an illustrated book published by Routledge. In 1938 Dunbar produced illustrations for A Gardener’s Diary, an appointments book for Country Life.

Galley proof of preliminary prospectus for A Gardener’s Diary 1938

Preparatory drawing for A Gardener’s Diary, 1938

Study for April, A Gardener’s Diary 1938

April, 1937

In 1940 Evelyn Dunbar was appointed to the War Artists’ Advisory Committee – the only woman to be given a full time salaried role as a war artist. Her work during this period shows the contribution of the Women’s Land Army and the Women’s Voluntary Service to the war effort. From gathering in harvests of peas, potatoes and corn, to sewing military camouflage, Dunbar recorded the detail of these vital activities. She met Roger Folley, an agricultural economist, in 1940 and they were married in 1942. Folley’s work took him all over the country in the war years, and this enabled Dunbar to feature a wide range of locations in her paintings, as she followed him to each posting. They eventually returned to Kent, living near Wye, in 1950.

Dunbar’s paintings from this period are accomplished, and show great affinity with the English people and countryside. But perhaps their necessary, but narrow, focus on England in war-time made it inevitable that they would be overtaken by new styles, as the public, seeking a brighter future in the 1950s, left the hardships of the 1940s behind them.

Study for vegetable cultivation at Sparsholt Farm Institute, 1940

Baling Hay 1940 Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, Cardiff

Threshing, Kent 1942/42 Government Art Collection

Dunbar’s illustration style is very different from that of her paintings, and here the gardens she depicts while still vernacular, are more formal. Two front gardens show neatly edged flower beds, picket fences and topiary – all classic features of the cottage garden. The slightly child-like charm of this work is produced by Dunbar’s use of a very even weight of line – as well as the architectural details of the houses and the plants in their gardens. Lots traditional country dwellings in the 19^th century had a conifer tree planted close to the house and Dunbar shows these, along with tulips in the borders.

Dunbar also decorated her personal letters with garden motifs and designs. In a thank you letter to Edward and Charlotte Bawden she includes a garden plan and planting suggestions for them – rather mischievously including a dandelion and some snails in one corner. A letter to Charles Mahoney shows a wonderful topiary peacock, a shape typical of gardens in Kent and Sussex which are still cultivated today.

Pussy Cat

Vignette of stylised house and garden for Gardeners’ Choice, 1937

Our first house, 1945

Letter to Edward and Charlotte Bawden, 1936

Letter to Charles Mahoney 1936

From The Book of Topiary (1904) Charles Henry Curtis and William Gibson (Biodiversity Heritage Library)

Balmoral Cottage, Benenden, Kent

Stylised yew peacock at Great Dixter

Contained in a series of vignettes drawn on a sheet of squared paper is a design with a jug of flowers against a background of an open book, and in the winter of 1945 – 46 Dunbar developed this idea into the painting, ‘Pansies and Violas’. Her choice of these modest items for this painting encapsulates her talent for recording the domestic world in a way that celebrates its beauty; allowing people, their gardens and everyday activities and objects to transcend their ordinariness.

A set of 20 vignettes

Pansies and Violas, winter 1945-46

With special thanks to the Liss Llewellyn Gallery and Evelyn Dunbar’s biographer Christopher Campbell-Howes.

Further reading:

Evelyn Dunbar’s work at the Liss Llewellyn Gallery here

Evelyn Dunbar: A Life in Painting – a biography by her nephew Christopher Campbell-Howes here

Paintings in UK museum collections via Art UK here

Evelyn Dunbar Wikipedia entry here

Pallant House Gallery: Andrew Lambirth’s essay about Dunbar here

June borders of lupin and iris in the Garden at Munstead Wood from Gardens for Small Country Houses

Between the first edition of Gardens for Small Country Houses published in 1912, and the fourth which appeared in 1920, the world had changed. The effects of the Great War on the population and economy of the UK were profound and those whose wealth and status had insulated them in the past faced the challenges of a new economic and political climate.

But change brings opportunity. In the preface to the fourth edition, a collaboration between designer Gertrude Jekyll and Lawrence Weaver, architectural editor of Country Life, they anticipate the rise in popularity of the small country house, both with wealthy down-sizers and new owners.

Without seeking to fill the role of gloomy prophet, we cannot escape the belief that the changes in social life and habit, which are the mark of our economic troubles, are striking at the maintenance of great gardens, as of great houses, in this pleasant land. But if those who have built up, kept, and loved so well their spacious gardens, must needs be content with smaller houses, and if, as seems likely, the wider distribution of wealth will lead to-morrow to the creation of many more small country houses, the art of making gardens for such houses will increase in importance.

Clearly, to the Country Life reader a ‘small’ house was, by modern standards, quite substantial. See below for an example of a building Jekyll and Weaver describe as a small cottage:

In the book Jekyll and Weaver suggest how a harmonious relationship between house and garden might be created in terms of its scale, features, planting and placement the wider landscape. Their expertise ensures that the case studies used for approaches for garden design in various locations in the UK are still illuminating today, even if our tastes in garden styles might have moved on.

Jekyll identifies both medieval and Tudor gardens as inspirations for the ‘new’ gardens she and others were making in England at this time. Both Jekyll and Weaver admired the hillside garden at Owlpen Manor in Gloucestershire (now a hotel), an example of a formal garden where large, bold yew topiary and hedging are used to anchor the house to its surroundings.

.. with what modesty the house nestles against the hillside and seeks to hide itself amidst regiments of yews. Great skill has been shown in their planting, for they emphasise the drops between the existing levels of the terrace, even though they partly veil them.

Using photographs and plans Jekyll and Weaver explain how the changes of level have been used. Without this terracing and the dramatic yew planting, the house might appear to be about to fall off this steep hillside, but actually looks secure and intriguing, partly obscured by foliage. The repeated yew also also echoes the mass of the woodland above the house, which otherwise might feel oppressive.

Owlpen: view from north-west from point B (see plan)

Curved entrance stairway at Owlpen Manor

The climber on walls of the house has been clipped very precisely at different levels (below the window on the right of the picture and above on the left). These solid blocks of foliage help to reinforce the formal feel of the planting. The dark yews contrast with the pale stone of the house and also form a backdrop for the beautiful gateway with its curved steps.

Curved stone steps appear as a design feature in many new gardens shown in this book, including those pictured below at Highmount, in Surrey. Also located on a steep slope, these curved steps were used by Jekyll as part of an ambitious design for the garden of a new house.

Jekyll explains,

The garden ground, all on the southern face of the hill .. had already been laid out to a certain degree when the garden designer took it in hand. Tennis lawn, croquet lawn and bowling green had been levelled and made; but the steepness of the remainder composed of grassy slopes between clumps of shrubs and flowers of no particular design, was found to be incommodious, and great need was felt for something more restful and systematic.

Jeykll’s solution was to dig into the chalk hillside to create a large level space, and install retaining walls to provide some shelter in this exposed site. She acknowledges that this solution was expensive and applauds her client’s willingness ‘to face the necessary outlay, by no means a slight one’.

Highmount, Guildford: General Plan

One of the features of Jekyll’s general plan of the garden is a rose garden, at the bottom of the slope with a water lily tank at one end, and a six foot high retaining wall running along the entire length, the top of which was planted with plants that would tolerate the free draining and exposed position. Jekyll says,

The wall is in full sun, and the good plants and sub-shrubs we have from the Mediterranean region – lavender, rosemary, santolina, othonna and so on, with pinks, stonecrops and several of the rock loving campanulas of the Alps (to name only a few of the plants utilised) – rejoice in the full southern exposure and the brilliant, unveiled light of the high elevation.

Photographs of the garden (taken two years after planting) show the extent of the works.

From the middle of the rose garden. View point C on general plan.

Circular tank and steps at west end of rose garden. Point of view “A” on general plan.

The west end of the pergola, from view point “G” on general plan.

The garden-houses, from view point “F” on general plan.

Many of Jekyll’s planting plans are reproduced in the book, showing her method of planting in drifts, using groupings of the same plant to amplify their effect. For Highmount Jekyll talks about the importance of having a coherent planting scheme to define each section of the garden.

Offering to the eye one clear picture at a time they rescue the beholder from the distracting impression of general muddle and want of distinct intention that is so frequent in gardens and so wasteful – wasteful because a place may be full of fine plants, grandly grown, but if they are mixed up without thought or definite scheme they only produce an unsatisfactory effect, instead of composing together into a harmonious picture.

Planting plan of borders of West Walk. See general plan. Jeykll describes the colour scheme as ‘mostly of yellows, with tender and brilliant blue’.

The mixed borders of the west walk (above) featured golden privet, box and elder and a single yellow rose ‘Jersey Beauty’ as well as rudbeckia, helenium, anthemis, verbascum, tansy and yellow snapdragon. Splashes of blue were provided by lavender, delphinium and campanula. Nothing if not colourful.

Gardens for Small Country Houses

Gertrude_Jekyll

Lawrence Weaver