Renewing Cedric Morris’ garden at Benton End in Suffolk
Appointed in spring 2023 by the Garden Museum, to commence a three year long phase; to lead the renewal of this once extraordinary garden of the artist plantsman Cedric Morris. A garden Beth Chatto referred to as ‘mind stretching’ and ‘eye-widening’, Morris’ garden was filled with hundreds of unusual plants and rare species often collected on winter painting excursions in the Mediterranean, it was also the ground where he bred his famous bearded irises.
Standing above a bend in the river Brett and on the edge of the Suffolk town of Hadleigh, Benton End is a Tudor house, which from the 1939 to the early 1970’s was home to the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, founded by Morris and his lifelong partner Arthur Lett-Haines. The garden was for many students a place to paint and find inspiration. For Morris, I imagine, there must have developed a stimulating relationship between garden and canvas; growing plants he knew he’d love to paint and feature within compositions.
Over the course of the four decades Morris gardened Benton End, the garden changed as his skill and artistry as a plantsman flourished. In the early years, at the time of the Second World War, he grew vegetables. After which a time of intensive iris cultivation happened; he named over 90 of his iris inventions, they often bear the ‘Benton’ prefix. But on top of this, Morris was a truly brilliant plantsman and harnessed the sandy loam of Benton End’s walled garden to successfully grow swathes of fritillaries, masses of lilies, peonies and poppies; truly a cornucopia of plants from across Mediterranean regions of Europe and North Africa.
When Morris died in 1982, his plant collection was largely dispersed, yet fortunately many bulbous plants remained undisturbed and in situ within the garden. Over forty years later, many treasured plants once cultivated by Morris, still survive today. This fragile starting point is where this once in a lifetime project restarts. With the ambition that once again, Benton End’s garden will inspire artists and gardeners akin.
In summer 2023 Lottie Hampson photographed the garden, and these images will continue to be evocative as progress is made in gently coaxing the garden up from its sleepy past few decades.
JH ~December 2023
Photography by Lottie Hampson
