A life in colour
Floral meadows surround the old house at Benton End in Suffolk. Once, though, this was one of England’s most beautiful country gardens, created by plantsman and artist Sir Cedric Morris, whose life was as colourful as his plants. Now there are plans to renew the house and grounds as a vibrant centre for art and gardening, writes Twigs Way
Light streams through the windows of Benton End, illuminating the upstairs studios where Cedric Morris once painted the young Lucian Freud. It fills the communal dining room, where artists once argued over the sex life of camels and washed up in a sink made of Portuguese tiles.
Outside, the ghosts of past garden plants emerge from the wild meadows. Lucy Skellorn, Benton End research assistant, carefully points out the speckled fritillaria, deep-red wild tulips, Sicilian honey garlic and scarlet anemone.
Striking crown imperials glow yellow and orange in neglected corners. A vigorous Rosa ‘Sir Cedric Morris’ dominates the upper garden; by June it will be a flamboyant display of white blossoms. These are just a few of the plants dubbed ‘Cedric’s ghosts’: some of the last surviving specimens from what was once one of England’s finest gardens.
BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS
The garden was created by artist and plantsman Sir Cedric Lockwood Morris (1889–1982). Born in Wales, he flourished in 1920s Paris and partied with the ‘bright young things’ of London, before turning to the sensuous joys of plants and painting in rural Suffolk. A bohemian dressed in berets and baggy trousers, he kept parrots and peacocks and painted wild birds in his garden paradise at Benton End. There he surrounded himself with fellow artists, students, lovers – and generations of fecund felines.
Morris met his lifetime partner, Arthur Lett-Haines (known simply as Lett) in the post-war celebrations of 1918, in an atmosphere of freedom that was to mark the rest of their lives together. Both were already artists, but as Morris’s exhibitions sold out, Lett’s sculptures and surrealist art were less successful. In 1929, they made South Suffolk their permanent base, leasing Pound Farm in Higham, where Morris had made his first garden. Their East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, initially based at Dedham, provided an oasis for artists whose work and personal lives were outside of the mainstream. The school was an instant success – before spectacularly burning down in 1939.
Searching for a house large enough to accommodate friends and students, the couple discovered Benton End in 1939. Covering 1.2 hectares and divided between what are now known as the Walled Garden and the Top Garden, the site slopes gently down to the west and the River Brett, with the afternoon sunlight slanting across the gardens. Morris would rise at 6am to garden, while Lett lay in his woodpanelled bedroom until noon, emerging to feed students on a heady mix of Mediterranean vegetables – aubergines, peppers and garlic – grown in the vegetable beds from seeds sourced from Morris’ travels. His dishes were influenced by the celebrated cookery writer Elizabeth David, a close friend.
Grade II-listed Benton End was Cedric Morris’s home from 1939 until his death in 1982; 
WHERE TO SEE CEDRIC MORRIS’ ART
Renewed appreciation for the works of Cedric Morris in recent years has led to a flurry of exhibitions about him and increasing interest from collectors and galleries.
London gallery Philip Mould & Company led two exhibitions in 2018, including ‘Beyond the Garden Wall’ and ‘Artist Plantsman’, which can still be enjoyed in book form. Upon Morris’s death in 1982, he bequeathed more than 100 paintings and drawings to his friend, the artist Maggi
Hambling, who presented these to Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury, Suffolk, in 2017. The gallery is closed for redevelopment, but you can see the collection at gainsborough.org/collection/cedric-morris/.
Other works by Morris, including The Eggs (1944), Iris Seedlings (1943, pictured left) and a portrait of Lucian Freud (1941), painted at Benton End, are housed in the Tate in London. tate.org.uk
BOHEMIAN LIFE AT BENTON END
Students who came for the French-based ‘cours libre’ – guidance with a light touch, mainly from Morris – included the young Lucian Freud, who later became a star of the British art scene, and whose careless cigarette end may have been responsible for the blaze at Dedham. Other notable students included Lucy Harwood, Joan Warburton and Glyn Morgan, who later recalled that “the air was heavy with the pungent scent of flowers and the room roared with conversation and laughter… the whole place was exotic and exciting.” Arriving as a young girl, Maggi Hambling – now one of Britain’s best-known artists – felt that Benton End was where her life in art really began.
Cedric produced at least 90 named varieties of iris; hesperis has endured at Benton End since Cedric’s time; a wide variety of plants still thrive in the walled garden
“Morris’s canvases burst with the plants he adored: irises, hellebores, poppies, tulips”
Visitors and friends included gardener and writer Vita Sackville-West, the famous flower arranger Constance Spry, and post-war artists John Nash, Francis Bacon, Kathleen Hale and Bernard Reynolds. The writer Ronald Blythe described it as a “paradise of pollen and paint”, while for garden designer Beth Chatto – whose life in gardening was inspired by Morris’s planting – it was “another world”.
Morris would set up easels among the flowers; small paint bottles he left there years ago are now being found during the gardens’ reawakening. The many paintings of the gardens record their evolution. Morris’s own canvases burst with the plants he adored: irises, hellebores, poppies, crown imperials, tulips and star-of-Bethlehem.
From those first wartime years when the walled garden held vegetables, then evolved to a series of formal beds, the garden eventually loosened into winding gravel routes around a spectacular mix of species plants, a “cornucopia” that Beth Chatto described as a bewildering, mind-stretching, eye-widening canvas of colours, textures and shapes. Winter travels in Algiers, Mexico and the Azores provided both artistic inspiration and plant collecting opportunities for Morris, while Lett retreated to London comforts.
CEDRIC MORRIS, PLANTSMAN
Cedric Morris was an avid and experimental plantsman specialising in species plants, bulbs and irises. Each winter he would travel to countries such as Turkey and Portugal, discovering plants to establish at Benton End. By the 1950s, Morris grew more than 1,000 new iris seedlings a year, drawn to their elegance and delicacy, although memorably also calling them the “temperamental sluts” of the plant world. Today, Benton End irises are increasingly popular and can be bought from the nurseries of Beth Chatto, who found her own inspiration in his garden (Beth’s garden is pictured right). Beth Chatto’s nurseries also sells the perennial poppy, Papaver ‘Cedric Morris’, bred by Morris at Benton End. bethchatto.co.uk/a-z/i-n/iris-cedric-morris-cultivars/
BBC Archive
Listen to artist Maggi Hambling discuss Cedric Morris in Radio 3’s Arts & Ideas, from 2018. genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/p063xqq9
PROLIFIC PLANT-BREEDER
Through the post-war period, Morris became increasingly obsessed with the irises for which Benton End is now famous. Working alongside Nigel Scott, his then-lover, Morris potted as many as 1,000 iris seedlings each season.
Some would argue that it is the irises, as much as the paintings, that have led to the revival of interest in Morris. In 2015, Sarah Cook, one-time head gardener at Sissinghurst, created a glorious exhibit of Benton End irises at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, where their distinctively smoky hues created a sensation.
The roll call of lovers and friends at Benton is remembered in the names Cedric gave his irises: ‘Benton Nigel’ after Nigel Scott;
‘Benton Judith’, a dark purple; while ‘Benton Menace’ and ‘Benton Baggage’ are both named after cats.
THE REVIVAL PROJECT BEGINS
In 2018, the art dealer Philip Mould – known beyond the art world as the co-presenter of BBC programme Fake or Fortune? – staged twin exhibitions of Cedric Morris paintings.
The works on show reflected both Cedric’s travels outside the garden gate and his life as artist-plantsman at Benton End. Hosted by the Garden Museum in London, talks and events inspired by the exhibitions sparked the involvement of the Pinchbeck Charitable Trust, which managed to purchase Benton End later in 2018. A visionary project to revive Benton End in partnership with the museum was born.
As Garden Museum director Christopher Woodward enthuses, Benton End was a lifechanging experience for the many artists and writers who visited, firing creativity and invention. Soon, this paradise of pollen and paint will once again thrill with enthusiasm and enjoyment, an unexpectedly exotic world of inspiration, art and plants among the quiet Suffolk landscape.
Twigs Way is a garden historian, researcher and writer inspired and intrigued by the role of gardens and plants in artists’ work.
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