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Eric Ravilious, Greenhouse: Cyclamen and Tomatoes, 1935 (Tate) |
Ravilious
stumbled upon this horticultural treasure while exploring the village of Firle,
one of eight greenhouses concealed within a walled garden built to supply Firle
Place with fresh produce. Along the walls grew espaliered fruit trees,
including the celebrated greengages first introduced to Britain in the
eighteenth century by Sir William Gage, while the hothouses included a mushroom
house and a rare Victorian strawberry house in which plants grew in the warm
air close to the roof and were lowered by pulley for picking.
This
fabulous kitchen garden was watched over by the bearded head gardener, Mr Humphreys,
who had, as a young man, travelled up the Amazon on a journey of botanical
discovery. Ravilious befriended him and went on to paint several of the
greenhouses, creating a monument to these elegant structures.
You can buy
tomatoes from the same greenhouse today, from a stall across from the Firle
Stores, though the rest have all but disappeared. In 1944 a Spitfire brought
down a doodlebug nearby and the resulting explosion shattered every pane of
glass in the village; the walled garden never fully recovered. The great storm
of October 1987 caused further destruction, plucking whole polytunnels from the
ground and spiriting them away.
But this
one greenhouse survives, lovingly maintained and tended by Firle native Jim
Piper. He remembers what the garden was like when he was a boy, when his mother
was nurse to the Gage family, but though in his seventies he is too young to
remember Mr Humphreys. He does, however, tell a story of the venerable
botanist’s old age. Old-fashioned in dress and outlook Mr Humphreys was the
object of good-natured taunts from village lads, delivered from the safety of
the churchyard beyond the garden wall.
‘None of
you buggers knows anything about hard work,’ he liked to retort, ‘But when I
snuff it you’ll have to work bloody hard because I’m going under that yew
tree.’
Sure enough
his grave can be found only yards from the garden, in the tough tangle of roots
beneath the churchyard yew.
This is an excerpt from 'Ravilious in Pictures: Sussex and the Downs', published by The Mainstone Press. The painting is currently on show at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Meanwhile, Laura Freeman has dug up further info on the Firle greenhouses, which you can read about here.