Scenes from a Garden - Part One

There have been very few opportunities to get out and about just recently but last week we managed to find a couple of hours or so of dry, fairly sunny weather to visit a couple of gardens we'd been wanting to see for a long time. First up was Rennishaw Hall in Derbyshire. Family home of the Sitwell family. The Hall is still lived in by the family but the gardens are open for viewing, as are the family museums - mostly dedicated to the 'terrible trio' as they were known. Costume, books, photos and other mementos of Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell jostling for position with exotic costumes from opera and stage productions, ordinary but somehow spine chilling, everyday objects used by Hitler and Eva Braun and Mussolini and Clara Petacci, Gertrude Lawrence's letters and fur coat and Field Marshall Montgomery's pink pyjamas. The gardens were truly wonderful and outside I found this amazing sculpture.



It depicts the British cellist Amaryllis Fleming (half sister the writer Ian Fleming and illegitimate daughter of the artist Augustus John.) The work is by sculptor (or should I say sculptress?) Fiore de Henriques. Below is one of the many lovely seats - unfortunately all too wet to sit on - dotted around the gardens. This one just caught my eye, I'm not sure why.