A museum find

I doubt any of us have an office quite like this one.

Edgar J Kaufmann’s office on display at V&A East

As the information board says: “this office is the only complete interior designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright on permanent display outside the USA”. Edgar J Kaufmann’s office designed for his department store was given to the V&A by his son in 1974, after his father’s death. However the bit of information that caught my eye was that it is made of swamp cypress plywood.

I find that whenever I make a plant story, suddenly I will start to notice that plant wherever I go. It’s happened with Monkey Puzzle trees and Yucca plants and now a swamp or bald cypress though of course this isn’t a living specimen. (Though I did notice a photo of a living one growing in Wisley in this month’s RHS magazine!)

If you haven’t heard the episode about Napoleon and the bald cypress he bought back from Louisiana for his friend - I’ve put it below. When I met Gaël, (photo beneath) the current custodian of ‘Napoleon’s tree’, it had recently fallen. However Gaël’s conversation with fellow bald cypress enthusiast Harvey from Louisiana, is fascinating.

A book recommendation

I am currently reading Miss Willmott’s Ghosts by Sandra Lawrence. I began reading it because in a couple of weeks I am going to visit Warley Place in Essex. Once this was the family home of Ellen Willmott where she had built a beautiful garden that was much admired. However and I’ll tell you more when I see it, the house is gone and the garden too.

I suspect many of us may have heard the phrase ‘Miss Willmott’s ghost’ referring to her habit of secretly scattering Eryngium giganteum seeds in other people’s gardens. The following year, this ghostly plant would appear as a reminder of her presence. Sandra Lawrence suspects that this story is probably a myth. This biography often reads like a detective story, as its writer seeks out faded photographs and snippets of correspondence, searching in archives and rotting trunks, to uncover the truth about this incredible gardener.

The book begins with a mystery. It’s lunchtime, 26th October 1897 and the Royal Horticultural Society is celebrating Queen Victoria’s 60th jubilee by honouring ‘horticulture’s sixty finest living representatives in front of their peers’ with a Victoria Medal of Honour - VMH. This remains gardening’s highest award and there will only ever be 63 living recipients, marking the Queens eventual 63 years on the throne. On that October day in 1897, Miss Willmott is one of only two women amongst the sixty being honoured (the other is Gertrude Jekyll) and thus Ellen’s absence is obvious and as Sandra Lawrence puts it: ‘will not be forgiven lightly’. So the question she poses is why did Ellen Willmott not attend the ceremony?

Miss Willmott was an heiress and at one point the owner of 3 homes in England, France and Italy and she moved between all three, designing the gardens, acquiring plants. No expense was spared and in fact when the home in France burned down, she had begun the task of rebuilding it within weeks. However eventually the money began to run out and I am in the throes of reading how she lives though this next phase of her life, pretending all is well, whilst desperately trying to raise funds.

I would throughly recommend this book if you haven’t read it. I feel that Sandra Lawrence is so painstaking in her work, determined to go beyond the headlines of the ‘bad stuff’ about Ellen, the meanness, the eccentricity and to really try to understand what was happening in this extraordinary gardener’s life.

A blog recommendation

Finally I wanted to share the work of garden journalist, Alexandra Campbell. I met Alexandra through the Garden Media Guild. Her website is called the Middle-Sized Garden and aimed at those whose garden is bigger than a courtyard, but smaller than an acre. I think in fact, there is plenty of great advice in there for all of us whatever the size of our plot so do take a wander around her site.

Her recent post about the language of soil improvement was a great read; ‘bacteria and funghi are no longer linked to the words ‘how to get rid of’ … these are the future.

Happy reading and have a lovely weekend

Sally

x

ps thanks for the buddleja photographs - do please keep them coming, any sightings over the next few weeks which you can snap, perhaps from a train window, will be gratefully received.