By James Horner, Benton End Head Gardener
Ahead of John Morley’s upcoming exhibition at the Garden Museum, his first solo show for over 30 years, I went to visit him at his home in Suffolk, to hear more about his connection to Benton End, see his remarkable snowdrop collection, and to hopefully receive plants which he received from Cedric Morris and now wishes to give back to Benton End’s garden renewal project.
John lives with his wife Diana Howard, also an artist, together with their young Bedlington Terrier, Magnus. On arriving, I find John in the garden, non-surprisingly. I’m clutching several flowers of a snowdrop I’d picked earlier that morning at Benton End and hope John can confirm them to be the cultivar he named, decades ago, ’Benton Magnet’. We take the posy inside, and settle around the kitchen table with Diana to drink tea, coffee and share some bakery treats. Magnus is soon back out the door and scrambling up the Catalpa tree, with the agility of a cat, to bark off any passing creature, which in truth is seldom anything as the couple live at the end of a single-track road leading only to their house.
They moved to Suffolk in 1973 and John taught at the, then named, Ipswich School of Art. It wasn’t long before he was first taken to Benton End in Hadleigh by the novelist Elizabeth Smart. From then on, John regularly visited on a Thursday afternoon, once finished for the day in Ipswich. He would always ring ahead and Lett (Arthur Lett-Haines, Cedric Morris’s lifelong partner) would always answer and say: “Oh Mr Morley, Cedric always likes to see you”. In those days John travelled around Suffolk on his moped, sometimes the train conductor would allow him to pop it aboard, shortening his time on the road. But frequently John would return from visiting Benton End with his bike’s panniers overflowing with plants given to him by Cedric Morris. Diana remembers him arriving back home, looking like a “mobile jungle”.
John’s garden wraps around the house which when Diana and he bought it had previously been a row of 4 worker’s cottages, with a garden full of nettles. The rich Suffolk soils around them are today parcelled into arable fields. They recall farmland ponds being lost when filled in and less trees in the landscape now, yet their garden is studded with thousands of crocuses, popping up between the brickwork paths and horticultural marvels at every step. This is both an artist’s and a plant person’s garden and my experiences of it give me an impression of how Cedric Morris’s garden must have felt.
The day moves along swiftly, a clipboard is found for me, unbelievably, to start a list of plants I want! We criss-cross the garden, pencil in hand, camera active and questions firing. Every plant seems to have a tale of a giver, a place where it first occurred, a plants person who discovered it and another who named it after them. We’re especially on the hunt for plants John received from Cedric Morris. And first up is a peony which John knows to have come from Benton End. Paeonia ‘Late Windflower’, was bred by Professor A. P. Saunders in 1939, it’s a very elegant hybrid of 2 species peonies. Such peonies are multiplied and shared by division and so when John heaves upward the blade of his narrow spade and cracks off a chunk of the peony, we know we’re returning exactly the same plant as Cedric grew back to the garden at Benton End. John hands me a hefty chunk of the woody rooted peony, several red buds present signs of life. Little fragments of Saxifraga rotundifolia carry too upon the soil clinging to the peony.
Amongst the accumulation of snowdrops are occasional miniature daffodils. We admire them in turn; first ‘Bowles’s Early Sulphur’ and then the delightful Narcissus minor ‘Cedric Morris’ before an exceptional form of Narcissus pallidiflorus, unique with their upwards facing flower buds. For 40 years John ran the exceptional snowdrop nursery North Green Snowdrops. He named and introduced over 50 new snowdrop cultivars to horticulture. Last winter was North Green’s last one. The catalogues are as much collectors’ items as the bulbs, decorated with reproductions of John’s paintings. The winter operation of the nursery fitted in well with his painting routine, as he only paints in natural light and so had more time during the gloom of winter for snowdrops. The raised beds, where the most prized bulbs are potted and plunged into the soil, complete with a large label, become a haze of Cedric Morris’s annual field poppy, ‘Mother of Pearl’, in summer. John assures me that Cedric found this grey flowered variant of the typical red field poppy in the farm surrounding Benton End.
We continue around the garden, I often hurry back to bring the wheelbarrow along. We find Algerian iris, with huge pale lilac flowers, which came from Cedric; a lily from Tangier, promises of future gifts and further visits as we pass a fuchsia which too, came from Cedric, sweetly scented cyclamen, a tree peony, huge Crinum bulbs which would require a careful excavation, all for another day, a different season when it would be right to uproot or take a cutting of these precious plants.
I leave carrying a crate full of treasures in the winter twilight, long after Diana has called out to John that he’d better come in and not get too tired. His energy is remarkable, the garden is beautifully tended. Utmost, what is so striking is just how much care goes into the continuation of the cultivation of all these plants, each one with its own story of who, how, where. It’s clear that these plants have associations and possess the trigger to rekindle memories of moments with likeminded friends, that is one side of it, then there is also the plant which might be vulnerably scarce and must be grown and shared to keep it alive. People who love plants and make it an aspect of their life to grow and share them along with the plant’s story, do so in hope that the plant will be given new life with the new grower. This is exactly why Cedric Morris asked his friend Jenny Robinson to act as his plant executor and pass on his plants. So that the plants might keep on living, flourishing in the hands of someone new who might relate to them. Thanks to artist plantsman John Morley, with these special plants, Benton End’s spirit of generosity continues, in spades.
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