Tag Archives: Frances Bissell

A PIGEON IN A CRAB APPLE TREE

THE DAHLIA PAPERS’ RECOMMENDATIONS FOR GARDENING CHRISTMAS PRESENTS – AND HOW TO REMAIN PALE AND INTERESTING WHILST ACQUIRING THEM

Wood pigeon in crab apple tree, Laxfield, Suffolk, December 2014

At the turnstiles, South Kensington tube station. I am bracing myself for a first session of Christmas shopping when I find myself turning right into the tunnel instead of making my way upwards to ground and shop level. The station has long borne a tantalising sign that simply says ‘Museums’ and flashing through my mind was the knowledge that the refurbished Cast Courts at the Victoria and Albert Museum had re- opened only the night before. How could I resist sneaking off to the V&A instead of weighing up the impact of the ‘faux’ aspect of a ‘faux mohair’ throw for my mother or worrying if an 18 year old boy, closely related to me, would show any sign of increased animation when discovering a ‘reinterpreted piece of apparel from the Adidas archive” (i.e. a navy blue t-shirt that says ‘By Nigo’ under a giant Adidas logo) in his Christmas stocking?

On arrival at the museum I am immediately drawn towards the ruddy glow of the John Madejski Garden – the wonderful courtyard garden at the heart of the museum. Here, glittering softly in a quiet rainbow of reds and golds, is the most wonderful, gently radiant, Liquidamber. Two wise visitors are picnicking calmly in the fading light under the best possible early Christmas tree.

Two wise picnickers under a Liquidambar, The John Madejksi Garden, V&A

I feel eighteen again myself as I enter Room 46a – which together with its neighbour 46b – now named the Weston Cast Court – are the only public galleries in the museum which display the same collection of objects as when they first opened: an exceptional group of 19th Century plaster cast reproductions which allow you to travel wondrously around Europe and through history in the space of a gorgeous hour.

Towering Trajan’s Column, Room 46a, Cast Courts, Victoria and Albert Museum

I am drawn first to the glimmering bronze detail of the Porta di San Ranieri – from Pisa Cathedral, c. 1180 – with this rhythmic scene of palm trees and Wise Men.
Electrotype of Panel from the Porta di San Ranieri, Pisa: The Three Wise Men

And then to the pale exquisite perfection of casts from the cloisters of the Church of San Juan de Los Reyes at Toledo c. 1480-1500:

Detail from cloisters of San Juan de Los Reyes, Toledo

There is a sense of wonder and tremendous calm in these rooms and yet it is fantastically intimate. You are allowed to get close, to photograph, sketch, just sit and imagine you are in Southern Spain or Florence.

I love the rhythmical boxy flowers carved from milky reddish stone from the central pier of a doorway at Amiens Cathedral, 1220-35:

And in the next door room, the yellow-gold exuberance of Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, Florence, 1425 -52:

Detail from Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise

There is an exhilerating sense of scale and it is a fantastic privilege to be able to experience seeing the Gates and Michelango’s David at a mere arm’s length from each other – even on a visit to Florence to see the real thing separate pilgrimages would of course be required to the Baptistry and the Uffizi Gallery respectively.

Michaelangelo’s David and Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise

I am entranced by the rather magical photographs which you cannot help but take of the box-framed ‘Fig leaf for David’ – believed to have been made in 1857 to protect the modesty of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert:

Fig Leaf for David, Brucciani & Co. c 1857

There is the crisp, star-burst clarity of decoration from the Tomb of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, 1505-09:

Detail from the Tomb of Ascanio Sforza, 1505-09

And I stay for quite a while before the exquisite cool angel-wing carving of Donatello’s Cavalcanti Annunciation, 1425-50:

Donatello’s Cavalcanti Annunciation

Before I leave I enjoy the inventive charm of the 3D oak tree and wheat sheaves of Orcagna’s ‘The Assumption and Death of the Virgin’:

The Assumption and Death of the Virgin, 1352, Andrea de Gione, known as Orcagna

I dart – for further fortification – into the cafe. Here the Gamble Room is resplendent with its year-round giant bauble lighting:

A giant bauble light, The Gamble Room, V&A Cafe

I am feeling much readier to think about Christmas and indeed Christmas presents and am going to change my approach. For myself (should anyone important be reading this …) I would be keen to start a collection of antique William Morris/William de Morgan tiles so that one day I will have enough to line a garden loggia …

William Morris tiles from the Cafe at the V&A

The loggia at the Arts and Crafts house, Standen, National Trust, East Sussex

More realistically, inspired by the Liquidambar in the John Madejski Garden, I am thinking that alternative Christmas Trees would be a great place to start for presents for family and friends:

The Madejski Garden at nightfall – The Liquidambar is now gold against gold

One of the prettiest trees to give at Christmas is a winter flowering cherry: Prunus x subhirtella ‘Autumnalis’. This is a small tree – worth looking out for a multi-stemmed one – which quietly lights up the garden from November to March with delicate, pink tinged white flowers. www.bluebellnursery.com has bare root plants at 125-150cm available for mail-order for £29.50.

Prunus x subhirtella ‘Autumnalis’

Another great present choice is a ready-trained U-cordon apple tree. Three of these – there is still time for a Christmas delivery if you hurry – arrived from Pennard Plants in time for Christmas last year. The trees were inspired by my visit to the Prieuré D’Orsan (see my December 5th 2013 post): they have been handsome and prolific and are excellent hosts at Christmas for midwinter lighting.

U-Cordon Apple trees, Camberwell with young fruit and with festoon lights and naked wire lights (both the latter are available from Cox and Cox )

U-cordon apple trees at the Prieuré D’Orsan

The apple trees carry slate labels which were also inspired by the labelling at the Prieuré – permanent gold marker pens, slate labels with or without holes and fine galvanised tying wire are all available very inexpensively from the brilliant The Essentials Company and would make another good present.

Gooseberry label, La Prieuré D’Orsan

Queen Cox label, South London

A crab apple tree with particularly long last red fruit would be another excellent tree to give at Christmas. Helen Fraser and I planted a pair of Malus x atrogsanguinea ‘Gorgeous’ from Landford Trees in one of our favourite gardens in Oxfordshire (see our Fraser&Morris website) where it is both long flowering and holds onto its fruit well into December:

Frosted Malus x atrosanguinea ‘Gorgeous’ fruit, Oxfordshire, December

A welcoming pair of red-fruited crab apples in a front garden at Laxfield, Suffolk

Another tree to buy in a pair for a welcoming front door would be some handsome half standard variegated holly trees – Ilex aquifolium ‘Argentea Marginata’. Really good size plants at 160-180cm are available for £44.50 each from the Big Plant Nursery

Ilex aquifolium ‘Argentea Marginata’ – flanking a front door in Canterbury and a close up of the light-catching leaves

My final suggestion of a tree to give for Christmas is a standard form of the White Currant ‘White Versailles’ – available mail order from Blackmoor Nursery for between £12 and £25 depending on whether you would prefer a bare root or a container grown plant.

A standard whitecurrant will grow into quite a sturdy, weeping small tree. It can cope with semi shade and leaves plenty of room underneath to plant with herbs perhaps or cutting tulips and wild strawberries which is the case in my own garden. Whitecurrant fruit is hard to find in the shops but a single small tree can be very prolific, producing fruit to be eaten fresh with other berries in the summer and then made into an exquisite jelly for the winter:

Frozen whitecurrants for making into jelly

Jane Grigson’s recipe from her wonderful ‘Fruit Book’ – another brilliant, enduring present – is based on Eliza Acton’s instructions. You don’t even have to remove the leaves and stalks from the currants – just cover the base of the pan with a thin layer of water, add the same quantity of sugar to fruit, boil hard for 8 minutes and strain to produce ‘a strong jelly of fine flavour’. The jelly is completely delicious with roast pheasant or lamb or with a blue cheese such as stilton. You will even be ahead of the game for Christmas presents the following year year…

Jars of jewel-like white currant jelly, Camberwell

Two other book suggestions are Frances Bissell’s The Floral Baker – which is like a jar of sunshine with recipes for tomato and lavender tart and marigold, olive and manchego scones and will keep your friends and family happy, dreaming of the summer to come:

And I can strongly recommend an almost dangerously provocative book for a plant nut: Bob GIbbons’ Wildflower Wonders of the World. I love this book – it cannot fail to make you want to make serious journeys to experience the intensity of the World’s most spectacular displays of wild flowers.

For a different kind of present for someone who loves plants and gardens, I have the work of two photographers to suggest.

I am a long standing admirer of Chrystel Lebas who uses a panoramic camera and long exposure times to create dreamlike sweeping landscapes which are hard to forget. Her series ‘Between Dog and Wolf’ – a translation of the French phrase for twilight, ‘entre chien et loup’ – has fantastic images of frozen shadowy, fairytale forests – what could be a better present to receive on Christmas morning? Her covetable prints are available from The Photographers Gallery

An image from the ‘Between Dog and Wolf’ series by Chrystel Lebas

Newly discovered for 2014 and absolutely on my own Christmas list, are the innovative iphoto images of award-winning photographer Nettie Edwards who is currently an artist in residence at Painswick Rococo Garden in Gloucestershire – more on this in The Dahlia Papers in 2015. You can read about her work and her time at Painswick in her blog Hortus Lucis A year in a garden of Light . I love the soft, atmospheric painterly quality of her photographs. Prints are available from about £100 – contact Nettie Edwards direct on net@nettieweb.co.uk

Four Photographs taken at Painswick Rococo Garden by Nettie Edwards, net@nettie.web.co.uk

I came upon my very last idea for an alternative Christmas tree – or indeed Christmas present – when walking in Peckham last week with artist and writer, Jake Tilson. We talked about his brilliantly illustrated, perceptively written new book about Christmas food (available mail order, of course from Tender Books ) as he led me to his latest find …

Together we peered over a back garden fence to admire the most fantastic Persimmon tree, heavily laden with orange fruit. The wonderful attribute of Persimmon – if you are after a spectacular December display – is that the fruit ripens very late and stays on the tree to dazzle on a winter’s day. Reads Nursery in Suffolk are selling large grafted specimen trees 5 – 6 feet tall, a bargain at £64.50.

Persimmon tree laden with fruit, Peckham

Do go to the Cast Courts at the V&A for a moment of Christmas calm then sit back and buy everyone you know a tree. Wishing you a very Happy Christmas, Non.

Trained apple trees with lights, Petersham Nurseries

Classic, perfect, holly decorations, Laxfield Church, Suffolk

WHAT TO EAT UNDER A MOUNT ETNA BROOM?

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TOM STUART-SMITH’S VIBRANT, SCENTED JULY GARDEN (AND THE CAKE TO MATCH IT) The Sunken courtyard garden, Serge Hill with brilliant yellow Mount Etna Broom billowing overhead and a soft tapestry of grasses, salvia, astrantia and Euphorbia at ground level

The problem Tom Stuart-Smith must face when he occasionally opens his Hertfordshire garden is that none of the visitors are inclined to leave. It is a glorious Monday in July and only a few miles north of the clutter and bustle of the Edgware Road. I step out of my car and am immediately met with this: idyllic, gently rolling parkland – blond grass and spreading oaks, the view softened by perfectly judged swathes of uncut meadow that divide the house from the countryside beyond:

The view from Serge Hill

Sweetly clad outbuildings begin the sense of welcome and tip you, deliciously unsuspecting, into the different garden spaces beyond.

Outbuildings festooned with clematis and roses

Turning right, my breath is taken away by stretches of pale, delicate Echinacea pallida which float freely like exquisite jelly fish in the Prairie.

Echinacea Pallida

In this gorgeous area of of prairie planting Tom has created a dreamy place to experiment with broad sweeps of colour and form: as each plant comes into its own it casts a certain new intensity or contrast of texture on the scene. Here, fantastically generous quantities of Dianthus carthusianorum add both an earthy density and an almost luminous glow to the softly pastel, slightly shredded quality of the Echinacea.

Dianthus carthusianorum and Echinacea pallida

The wonderful coral red Penstemmon barbatus coccineus is scattered gently through the planting to lift it away from the coolness of the pinks:

Coral red Penstemmon barbatus coccineus amongst Echinacea and Dianthus carthusianorum

And there are – almost hidden – dashes of a really wild orange from the native American milkweed, Asclepias tuberose

Asclepias tuberose with Dianthus carthusianorum

The whole scene is naturally masterfully framed – here by handsome hedges and rusty roof tiles:

Here by the simple pale blue-grey of the corrugated iron building designed by Ptolemy Dean:The towering forms of Silphium laciniatum – another native American prairie plant, the Compass plant – seem to herald a leitmotive throughout the garden, as if Tom Stuart-Smith is keen to ensure that there are tall elegant shadows of his tall elegant self just in case he is not personally there to greet you.

Silphium laciniatum against the sky

Through a simple oak gate into a classic, scented kitchen garden:

It is at this point that the visitors – who are here to support the NGS and The Garden Museum – begin to find the whole thing highly covetable and start to put down their own roots. The Prairie has been a surprising and ethereal adventure but here, there is a manageable, settled feel with that brilliant combination of productive order and sense of overspilling colour that you get from the happiest kitchen gardens:

Verbena bonariensis and Allium sphaerocephalon amongst beans in the kitchen gardenView through to the Pelargonium and tomato-filled greenhouse

The blue-grey corrugated iron and bleached wooden door of the kitchen garden ‘shed’ a subtle backdrop to pots of scented sweet peas, white agapanthus, espaliered fruit trees and lavender.

Tulbaghia violacea a brilliantly perky edging to a bed of moody blue-green cabbage

Back out of the kitchen garden and into the calm of meadow and hedge:

A further rounded, shaggy yew hedge forms a protective embrace around the main family garden:

Beyond the hedge I find myself in a rich terracotta, green and fading mauve haven of comfort and softness. This a National Garden Scheme version of the Marie Celeste – the table and chairs are set out and ready to go, an embroidered cinnamon coloured shawl is draped casually over a bench the doors to the house are breezily ajar. But there are no Stuart-Smiths about and again the visitors find themselves settling down at the table, moving on only with difficulty:Through the barn windows framed by a voluptuous draped vine, there is an intoxicating glimpse of rich yellow from the Mount Etna Broom beyond:Palest yellow hollyhocks provide a serene offbeat echo to the riot of yellow through the archway:

As you pull away from the house you reach a potentially formal area of clipped box hedges and sky-scratching yew columns (that Tom Stuart-Smith leitmotiv again) but in fact the topiary shapes serve more as a happy, forgiving foil to overspilling herbaceous planting.

The topiary shapes are used as a happy, forgiving foil to overspilling herbacious planting:Stately white Epilobium dances in the space between the yew columns

Stipa gigantea and Phlomis russeliana catch the light

There is a moment of elegant calm with neatly clipped hedges and a troupe of slender, lacy poplars (the need for something tall and slim again):

Poplars and clipped hedges agains the sky

And then the chance to meander along gently shaded wooded areas:

The planting combinations are simple, and always brilliantly thoughtful – here a blue geranium is illuminated by the tiny rice like flowers of the arching grass, Mellica altissima ‘Alba’ :

Melica altissima ‘Alba’ and a blue geranium

Here a rusty coloured Helenium and a dark red Dahlia have the glaucous foliage of Macleaya cordata as a backdrop and the signature brilliant green underplanting of Hakonechloa macra:

A wooden bench is almost hidden by the surrounding planting (again I watch as visitors make their way almost competitively over to this so that for a few precious moments the bench can be their own).

And then I am back to the sweet outbuildings again, almost forgetting that my tour is not yet over:

But beyond a papery constellation of white Romneya coulteri is a compelling sunken garden the star of which on this mid July day is without a doubt three brilliant Genista aetnensis – or Mount Etna Broom, known for the scrubby volcano edge habitat on which it grows wild.

One of my favourite Mount Etna Broom’s stands as sort of celebratory sentry – like an attractive, slightly bonkers festival-going uncle – outside the gates of Great Dixter in East Sussex

Genista aetnensis outside the front gate at Great Dixter

For a few weeks in July the tree tirelessly waves its relaxed limbs of cheery brightness and can be spotted mid-dance over hedge and meadow:

Here at Serge Hill, Tom Stuart-Smith has used its airy extravagance to lighten and brighten a sophisticated courtyard garden with Corten steel pools and panels, flemish brickwork and slender hardwood decking recycled from his RHS Chelsea Flower Show garden of 2006:

Stuart-Smith’s Chelsea 2006 garden

slender hardwood decking from Tom Stuart-Smith’s Chelsea 2006 garden

Square corten steel pools and flemish brick path from Tom Stuart-Smith’s 2006 Chelsea garden

The palette of the courtyard garden in 2014 is subtle and properly lived in. I love the broken streak of steel blue Eryngium amongst the bright greens yellows and mauves:

Steel blue Eryngium amongst the acid yellow of Euphorbia and soft grasses

Purple-black sedum adds depth to the bold architectural foliage and pea-like seedheads of Euphorbia mellifera:

Grasses additonal layers of hazy rhythm:

The richness of the velvety Chelsea Irises has been replaced by much gentler buttons of Astrantia

and the corten steel itself has become softer and satisfyingly dull.

The decking is now silvery and tempting underfoot. The simplicity of this low chair at the base of an outstanding cloud burst of the fragrant Myrtus luma is intensely seductive.So seductive in fact that pairs of women in white linen and couples with plump princely babies hover and perch and try to stay just that bit longer.

I am imagine staying too and my start wondering what would be the perfect thing to eat or drink in this refined, colourful haven. What should one bring to eat in this garden if one were ever invited as a guest?

I have been relishing Frances Bissell’s book, The Scented KitchenI have loved every minute of her learned, uplifting text: I have learnt how ‘In America, day lily buds are deep-fried and served as one would okra’ or, on the subject of flower oils I have been imagining ” a lobster brushed with jasmine oil prior to being roasted, or perhaps rose or carnation oil brushed on scallops before you grill them”. There is an enchanting process called enfleurage which can be used for flower butters “all you do is wrap a piece of fresh unsalted butter in muslin, bury it in a bowl of petals, cover and leave it in a cool place for about 12 hours… this method works well with roses, jasmine, pinks and violets … delicious on toast or teatime scones”…

I am pretty sure that ‘Taffety Tart’ would be surprising, sophisticated and deft enough to do the trick. Frances Bissell describes the tart as ‘an exquisite combination of lemon, rosewater and anis’ which was once a grand success when she cooked at the British Embassy in Cairo. It is a very light open apple tart with a layer of scented Pelargonium ‘Attar of Roses’ leaves between the pastry and the apple and sprinkled with sugar, softened butter, rosewater, lemon zest and anis or fennel seeds.

Option two would be Yotam Ottelenghi’s Apricot, Walnut and Lavender cake I have been wanting to make all year since it was published last summer in the Guardian.

Photograph: Colin Campbell for The Guardian

There is something enduring and seductive about Ottelenghi’s description of the recipe “it’s like Provence in a cake”. The colours, rich orange with soft mauve and the texture dense with ground oily walnuts and lightened by lemon zest could be just the thing to savour as you hang on for a few last minutes in this loveliest of gardens.

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