By Paul Liss, Liss Llewellyn
Since Leonardo or Dürer, it is rather surprising how few draughtsmen have dealt with the lavish delicacy of plant life compared to the number who have made masterpieces of drawing from the human figure. In England, particularly the land of gardeners (and draughtsmen), one might expect more; yet apart from John Nash, I can think of very few recent artists who have drawn plants with the vigour and understanding that Mahoney brought to them.
— Sir John Rothenstein, Tribute to Charles Mahoney, 1975
Charles Mahoney was a key figure in a golden generation of artists who attended the Royal College of Art in the early 1920s. Among his (better-known) contemporaries were Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Henry Moore, Enid Marx, and Barnett Freedman. When asked which students had most impressed him during his tenure at the RCA, William Rothenstein conjured up two names: Henry Moore and Charles Mahoney.
Mahoney was prominently featured in Tate Britain’s 2004 Art of the Garden and has been the mainstay of two recent exhibitions at the Garden Museum: Sanctuary: Artist-Gardeners 1919-1939 (2019) and Private and Public: Finding the Modern British Garden (2023).
In 1937, along with Evelyn Dunbar, Mahoney published Gardener’s Choice, a guide to creating the perfect suburban garden. Mahoney’s full-page line drawings for the publication highlight his extraordinary power of observation. According to the artist’s daughter, the content of the book was remarkably ahead of its time:
“It is only in the last few decades that general fashions in planting have caught up with the tastes and methods of my father and his artist-gardener friends (Edward Bawden, Geoffrey Rhoades, John Nash, and John Aldridge). My father’s love of gardening was strengthened by his relationship with Evelyn Dunbar, who came from a family of keen gardeners. Together, they explored Kew Gardens and attended the Royal Horticultural Society specialist shows at Victoria.
Plants such as Geranium species and the Gold and Silver-laced Polyanthus are now popular but were known by few gardeners in the 1930s. Among his favourites were Sunflowers, Geranium species, Auriculas, and the Gold and Silver-laced Polyanthus. Hogweed combined with Giant Scabious, Plume Poppies, and the invasive Polygonum cuspidatum. Box, lavender, or cotton lavender were planted alongside low-growing species such as Mossy Saxifrage or Creeping Campanula. Within all of them, plants were allowed plenty of freedom to grow and intermingle. An army of self-seeders such as Sweet Rocket, Corydalis lutea, Columbines, Welsh Poppies, and Alchemilla mollis ensured that any soil between plantings was not bare for long.”
Mahoney’s love of plants and gardening is first apparent in his early paintings of his home in Anerley and later in the many sketches he made of the back gardens of London houses where he lodged as a student.
Though Mahoney was never formally a part of the Great Bardfield group, he was instrumental in the designing and planting of the celebrated garden at Brick House. In 1937, he found his own haven—Oak Cottage in Wrotham, Kent—where he would live permanently from 1945 until his death in 1968.
His daughter recalls:
“The layout of the garden was unfashionably formal, though within this formality plants grew freely and exuberantly; only the hedges of lavender and box that confined them were clipped. A large bed of old roses, which at that time were unusual, concealed the studio. Cottage flowers and many less familiar species filled the beds between house and studio, while at the end of the garden, there flourished an eclectic mix of fruit trees and shrubs. Interwoven with these were my father’s huge specimen herbaceous plants, which he grew in order to draw them: Giant Hogweed, Japanese Knotweed, Cephalaria gigantea, sunflowers, and Plume Poppies.
To walk up the garden past the lawn and the rosebed was to enter one of my father’s paintings; plants waved above your head, silhouetted against the sky in mysterious patterns, and in wet weather, they deluged water down your neck. In fine weather, my father would emerge from the studio and sit absorbed in drawing his plants for hours on end, always wearing an old jacket and trilby hat. His garden provided him with more subject matter than he could ever use.
By the time he was 45, his health no longer allowed him to undertake heavy gardening, but he continued to enjoy the less demanding jobs. The studio, built after the war from munitions packing cases, stood among luxuriant plants halfway down the garden. He would retire there after breakfast and, ignoring lunch, would paint until the light failed. The studio held his extensive art library, and when light conditions were not suitable for work, he would read in his well-worn armchair, increasing his considerable knowledge of painting—or else making lists of new plants for the garden in his rounded copperplate hand.”
Evelyn Dunbar once warned him in a letter: “Don’t ever have too big a garden, or with your avidity for making the names in the catalogue come true, you’ll never touch a brush or a pencil.”
For his studio, Mahoney inhabited a shed constructed from munition packing cases. In front of the studio, an area nominally reserved for vegetables held a collection of half-hardy plants. The asparagus bed eventually succumbed to a sumptuous collection of variously shaped dahlias—except those with huge heads, which he disliked. He loved the formal perfection of the quilled, pompom, and collerette types.
Here too grew many types of Helianthus and other perennial daisies, admired for the subtle diversity of their shining heads. Behind the studio lay the fruit area, where three large apple trees surrounded a bonfire patch, and there the Giant Hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum) threw up magnificent umbels above ground-covering geraniums, periwinkles, and spring bulbs.
The shady beds beneath the hedges and beside the studio contained Thalictrums, Lilies, Daylilies, Hostas, Aconitum, Loosestrife, Geranium phaeum, and Epimediums. Between the lawn and the cottage, smaller beds contained mixed planting or rockeries—one dedicated solely to old-fashioned Pinks.
Next to the house, a sitting area had been cut out of the slope, with the retaining wall covered by Mossy Saxifrage and Campanula. Daisies of every kind filled the sunnier beds—Heleniums, Rudbeckias, Inulas, Asters, and Pyrethrums. The long, narrow bed beneath the stone south-facing wall supported pears, a huge grapevine, fuchsias, and roses. Beneath these, Crinum lilies, Verbascums, Verbena bonariensis, Ceratostigma, and Nerines flourished between bushes of Hibiscus, Abelia, Myrtle, and Choisya.
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