Two empty plinths

The death of former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher last week has led her supporters to cast around for ways to commemorate her. Ideas include a statue in some central London spot, perhaps outside the Houses of Parliament, or on the empty fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square. This would seem to me a bad idea, not just because Thatcher remains a highly divisive figure whose life many would not want to see celebrated, but because Trafalgar Square’s empty plinth already has a role.

The plinth was originally destined to display an equestrian statue, to accompany figures of Lord Nelson, two generals and a king, but it was never installed. So from 2005, the plinth has exhibited a series of specially commissioned artworks in a splendid scheme run by the Greater London Authority. The idea is both to make Trafalgar Square a vibrant public space, but also to “encourage debate about the place and value of public art.”

It has been a great success, allowing the display of (so far) five artworks, all different, some controversial. None of them would have been chosen in a soulless, lowest-common-denominator competition for a single, permanent piece. I don’t much care for the current display (a bronze sculpture of a boy on a rocking horse by Elmgreen & Dragset) but know that it is only temporary, and that the next one may be more to my taste (well, unless it does turn out to be of Margaret Thatcher…).

Here in New Delhi, we have our own empty plinth in the heart of the city: on the great ceremonial procession known today as Rajpath, and built by the British even as their control over their Indian Empire was waning. In 1936, Edwin Lutyens designed a white marble memorial to the late King-Emperor George V, to be erected close to the war memorial known as India Gate.

The memorial to George V, complete with statue; photograph from Irving’s Indian Summer.

After Independence of course, the Indians did not relish having a British monarch lording it over this great thoroughfare and eventually his statue was removed. Since the 1960s it has sat rather glumly in a park to the north of the city, once the site of major British pomp and ceremonies, but now little known.

The statue has gone, but Delhi’s plinth remains, sheltered under its fine baldachin or canopy, but resolutely empty.

There have long been arguments about what or who might replace old George on the plinth, but even obvious contenders such as Mahatma Gandhi have proved too controversial for plans to proceed. It has often struck me that Delhi might follow the example of Trafalgar Square and invite the best of Indian artists to produce a rolling programme of temporary installations for this most prominent spot. It would be a great shame if London’s novel example, rather than being replicated, were now to be lost.

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A mysterious French designer…

Search the internet for Elie Laîné and you’ll readily find that he was a once-celebrated nineteenth century French landscape designer. You’ll learn that he worked on big projects in at least three countries, with illustrious clients (including the Rothschilds and Leopold II, king of the Belgians) and top-notch collaborators such as the architect Hippolyte Destailleur.

Image of the Le Nôtre gardens at Vaux le Vicomte, during the time Elie Laîné was in charge of their restoration; Destailleur restored the château. From an album of photographs dated 1894-1898 in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Yet try to find out more, and Monsieur Laîné seems to slip into the shadows. I was delighted to see some of his plans and letters in the royal archives in Belgium, but no-one has been able to find original papers for any of his designs in England or France. His personal and professional life seem a complete blank. French sources now regularly describe him as méconnu - little known or forgotten.

Sketch signed & dated in Laîné’s hand. From the royal archives in Brussels.

It is proving fascinating and often frustrating to attempt to piece together his work and life (especially when I am thousands of miles away from most potential sources of information). Many people have been more than kind in providing their time and sharing their knowledge. In particular, one family member (despite speaking no French) used her genealogical expertise to trawl through hundreds of actes d’état civil and track down Laîné’s date and place of birth, and the names of his immediate family.

So what progress have I made? I certainly now have enough information for an article on Elie Lainé, the first one ever, it seems, dedicated to this important designer. The article should appear in a forthcoming edition of Historic Gardens Review, and will give a good sense of many of his projects, with some plans and information from letters he wrote about his designs for the king of Belgium. I can also give at least a glimpse of  his early life in the Loire valley and his time in Paris – and some hints about his character.

But there is so much more to learn about him. I still have no idea where he trained or how he became the landscape designer of choice for many rich clients; I have found no photograph of him; his place and exact date of death remain a mystery.

If anyone reading this has any information on the mysterious Monsieur Laîné, no matter how small, please do get in touch. I suspect that I will continue this research long after the article appears…

New planting to the north of the entrance drive at Waddesdon Manor in England c.1875, to a design by Elie Laîné. From the Rothschild Archive.

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Garden theme park disregards big attraction

We are in Northumberland for a couple of weeks, escaping the worst heat of the Delhi summer. A few days ago we revisited the rather pompously titled The Alnwick Garden, a  site created by the Duchess of Northumberland in part of the grounds of the ancient Alnwick Castle.

It is a garden I try – and fail – to love. The Duchess took a brave decision to use contemporary designs and designers to make this new site, rather than creating something classical and safe. She argued at the outset in 2001 that ”No gardens of this scale and ambition have been undertaken in Britain during this century. And no gardens will have quite such a magical effect on those who visit them.”  The Garden’s website now trumpets its “Must See” features, including the Poison Garden, the Tree House (apparently one of the world’s largest), the Serpent Garden with its hidden water features, and the Grand Cascade.

The garden is well – and expensively – done, much of the planting is lovely, and it is undoubtedly popular and increasingly well-known. Yet for me it has no sense of place or character. Instead it feels rather like a theme park, a collection of roller coaster garden experiences all stuck together in one big shiny venue, giving you lots of bangs for your buck, as they say, but no atmosphere or associations or quiet moments of reflection. It is a garden without a soul.

The rest of the castle grounds are utterly different. They are the characteristic distillation of the English countryside for which Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown is renowned. Created in the 1760s, the grounds are a fine example of his work, not perfectly preserved, but still a beautiful mix of trees, grass, water and English sky, setting off the castle building and providing a magnificent sense of permanence and serenity. The contrast with the gaudy business and sparkle of The Alnwick Garden just over the fence is delicious. The grounds offer a perfect spot to picnic, enjoy the fine views, and just to relax and ponder for a little while.

Yet, as far as I can see, the publicity for The Alnwick Garden makes no mention of the attractions of the castle grounds, despite them being assessed as of Grade I (exceptional) significance and having been designed by one of the most influential men ever to come from Northumberland (Brown was born and raised in nearby Kirkharle, and was no doubt much influenced by the lush, open countryside of his home county). When I asked at The Garden ticket booth whether my entrance fee allowed me to visit the Capability Brown landscape as well, I was met by a puzzled look, and had to explain what I meant – and then was wrongly told that it did not.

Maybe the contrast between the two garden styles is just too great to attract the same visitors. My nine-year-old daughter loves The Garden’s interactive water features, its dumper trucks and wobbly rope bridges. When I took her to the back window of the upscale gift shop, to peer at the Brownian landscape just visible behind the row of tills, she looked genuinely puzzled and said  to me: But, mum, it’s just grass and trees…

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Fake Brown?

Recent discussions on this blog about the merits or otherwise of historical restoration reminded me of an interview I conducted a couple of years ago with noted British designer Kim Wilkie. We discussed how Wilkie had done something more controversial than restore or reconstruct the past: he had installed a long-lost design that had never been executed historically. The fact that the design was by England’s greatest landscape designer, Capability Brown – and that the site was one of the most important country houses in England – only makes the story more fascinating.

Capability Brown’s 1782 plan for the grounds at Heveningham Hall, which lay unimplemented and forgotten for 200 years. Image used with permission from kimwilkie.com.

Applying eyeshadow is not a common analogy for the craft of landscape design. But it is a striking image used by landscape architect Kim Wilkie to explain the genius of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. Wilkie is well-placed to know: he is responsible for the implementation at Heveningham Hall in Suffolk of a Brown plan which had lain abandoned since 1782. Wilkie rejects the common description of the eighteenth century place-maker as an ‘improver’ of landscapes, and argues that he is best understood as someone who was ‘clarifying’ nature. Hence the eyeshadow analogy: English topography is often so gentle, argues Wilkie, that Brown made just enough changes to bring out the intrinsic nature of a site, but leaves us admiring the work of nature, rather than the efforts of the designer.

‘Brown’s real genius lay in being able to understand the way land is formed by water, probably more so than anyone I’ve encountered,’ he explains. ‘He had such a feeling for undulations, valleys, ridges, and how they all form together in such an English way. He was able to understand how to work with the underlying sense of geology and geography.’ This is why Wilkie believes that so many Brownian parks survive in such good shape today. In contrast, Brown’s successor Humphry Repton, although a great landscape portraitist, ‘didn’t have those underlying understandings – his parks have decayed much faster than Brown’s.’

Capability Brown at Heveningham Hall

Wilkie’s enthusiasm for Brown’s work is catching. So it seems inconceivable that one of Brown’s last, great plans, for a 200-hectare landscape park at Sir Gerard Vanneck’s country estate at Heveningham Hall, in rural Suffolk, was never fully implemented. Renowned scholar John Dixon Hunt has described the 1782 plans for Heveningham, which included a series of lakes over a mile in length along the valley floor, as a consummate example of how Brown rejected the contrived designs of his predecessors and instead wished to organise natural phenomena to create an enhanced version of nature.

It is not clear why only a small start was ever made on the proposals. According to Brown’s biographer Dorothy Stroud, his grand plans were met with criticism from neighbouring landowners. Conservation expert David Lambert has suggested more recently that the reason why the work quickly fell into abeyance may have been cost, flooding upstream, or perhaps just loss of momentum following Brown’s death the following year. In any event, when Gerard Vanneck, owner of Heveningham, died unmarried and childless in 1791, the whole estate then seems simply to have stopped developing. Wilkie calls it ‘an arrested moment.’

The house remained in the Vanneck family until 1970. Apart from a parterre added on the south side in the 1870s, no further work was done. In the first half of the twentieth century, declining family fortunes meant that parts of the estate were sold, and the house gradually fell into disrepair. It was further damaged by a 1947 fire. After a spell in public ownership, a failed attempt at restoration by a foreign businessman, and a second fire in 1984 (which gutted the east wing of the Hall), Heveningham was in a sad condition, its future uncertain.

Rediscovery of the Brown Plans

The grounds at Heveningham before Wilkie began work, from kimwilkie.com.

The estate was bought in 1994 by Jon Hunt, owner of the Foxtons property chain, who wished to turn it back into a private family home. Kim Wilkie was one of many landscape architects that Hunt interviewed about designs for the grounds, and admits to being at first somewhat wary of the new owner’s motives. ‘I was honest with him,’ he recalls now, with a smile. ‘I was rather suspicious of an estate agent buying a country house. I did not want to be used as a front for some development that I was unaware of.’ Undeterred, Hunt took Wilkie to see the estate, and persuaded him to take on the project.

Although the owner had already had plans drawn up for the lake in the grounds, nobody appreciated that Capability Brown had once been involved at Heveningham. Wilkie remembers: ‘It was only when we did the historical research, that we realised what we had.’ He praises Hunt for his immediate enthusiasm about Brown’s abandoned proposals.

I wondered whether he was surprised that this 200-year-old plan still seemed the most relevant and appropriate approach for the landscape. ‘No, not really,’ he replies. ‘We grew with it, and came to appreciate how subtle Brown’s work was. He had such a good eye, and a familiarity with geology and geography – and an understanding of construction. They were perfect, perfectly accurate plans.’

Gaining Approval

Wilkie did not seek easy options at Heveningham. As well as proposing the long-delayed implementation of Brown’s plans on one side, he recommended ripping out the Victorian parterre behind the house, and installing sweeping new grass terraces in its place. These were dramatic changes for the setting of a Grade I listed house.

He remembers that, when presented with his proposals to install the abandoned Brown plans, English Heritage at first was not sure how to react. ‘There was an initial intake of breath. It was difficult because it was not restoration, not reconstruction; it was philosophically new to them.’ Fortunately the preservation body did not demand the conservation of the existing landscape: Wilkie recalls appreciatively that ‘English Heritage had the courage to say, “Just because it’s old, it doesn’t mean it’s good.”’ They recognised that ‘Brown’s plan had a value of its own,’ and quickly came to view the proposals as ‘exciting.’

Wilkie’s sweeping terraces that replaced an unsuccessful Victorian parterre behind the house. Image used with permission from kimwilkie.com.

The removal of the parterre and its replacement with contemporary grass terraces, perhaps surprisingly, proved less challenging. Wilkie explains that ‘the area behind the house had always been unsuccessful.’ Even the young La Rochefoucauld brothers, whose detailed praise of the Hall in 1784 helped inform the restoration work at Heveningham, had described the then flower garden as being ‘as ugly as it is out of place.’ The subsequent Victorian parterre, according to Wilkie, made things worse, having been built badly and at a scale too small for the grand house. On this issue, he remembers, English Heritage was ‘fantastic,’ giving agreement for the first time for the demolition and replacement of a historic garden beside a Grade I listed property. He thinks it helped that his contemporary design of sweeping terraces ‘was not a pastiche, but a design working with the characteristics of the land. It was of our own time.’ Although he did not see this new design as a necessary counterpoint to the old, Wilkie remembers that ‘it brought a lot of pleasure to be implementing 200-year-old plans on one side of the house and a contemporary, new design on the other.’

Learning Lessons

It was perhaps a unique opportunity, to install a Brownian landscape for the first time, and Wilkie feels he has gained much from the experience. ‘I learnt really useful things: for instance, that a curve on a plan can look insignificant; I almost had the idea that it would need to be exaggerated. But the opposite was true: something you almost can’t read on the plan is very powerful on the ground. The gentle curves of Brown’s lake are much stronger in reality. Things like how light works.’ He pauses, reflecting. ‘It was a learning of subtlety.’ He seems almost embarrassed by the phrase, but it clearly captures well his immense admiration for Brown’s design.

I ask if Wilkie is comfortable with the fact that Heveningham is now routinely being described as ‘a Capability Brown landscape.’ He has, after all, previously worried that his work at Heveningham was ‘troubling’ historically, and has said that it could even be described as ‘fake Brown, in a way.’ He starts by accepting that what he installed ‘will inevitably have been different’ from what Brown would have done. Crucially, a farmhouse that the 1782 plans incorporated into the landscape has since been demolished. He never considered rebuilding the farmhouse, but tried instead to imagine how Brown would have dealt with the same situation. ‘So it’s not identical. But it is so close. The plans were so accurate – Brown had even sketched the profile of each tree, so you could tell the species. It doesn’t feel fake. It does feel like his plan.’ Perhaps most tellingly, Wilkie says that there is nothing he regrets about his work at Heveningham: ‘I would do it again exactly as I did.’

The Heveningham estate after the implementation of Brown’s abandoned design. Image used with permission from kimwilkie.com.

Wilkie’s work has arguably helped refresh our understanding of the genius of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, and appreciate anew how his subtle designs strive to clarify the land that contains them. At Heveningham, Brown’s composition of grassland, trees, water and gentle sky has – after two centuries in abeyance – finally been revealed as a masterful distillation of the English countryside.

A longer version of this interview was first published by Gardens and People. 

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Wildlife and gardens

Having lived on three continents, I am increasingly struck by the similarities and connections between gardens in seemingly very disparate countries. What confirms my location is not the plants or the layout or the use people make of the landscape – but the wildlife.

In Massachusetts, it was raccoons trotting along the tops of fences, the mongoose on the doorstep, and the occasional skunk lurking in the shrubbery that told me I was no longer in England. [One eagle-eyed reader has pointed out that native Bostonians would have been equally amazed by the mongoose; it was probably in fact an opossum.] A friend who lived only two hours north of Boston could entertain me for hours with tales of the moose and bears in her cornfield. It was as if she was on personal terms with space aliens. When we were in Paris, I was struck by the complete absence of grey squirrels in any park or garden, even though we were under three hours by train from the squirrel-laden London parks. Now in India, it’s the monkeys who confirm I am indeed a long way from home.

Last week I spent some time up on the northern ridge, researching the impact of the British on the Indian capital. The ridge is an ancient geological feature that runs diagonally across the city and was home to various grand colonial figures in the nineteenth century, and site of much of the action during the 1857 Uprising. Originally scrubland, it has for a hundred years been managed as forest. It is neatly planted, with park benches, wide paths, fences and litter bins. In the softer light of the Indian autumn, you could almost imagine you were in the UK (although the bougainvillaea slightly gives the game away).

It’s the bundi monkeys everywhere who are the real signal. To locals they may be nuisances who rip up gardens and carry TB, but to me they are an otherworldly joy, frolicking and leaping and just gathering in big social groups, in the same way that the jaunty raccoons never failed to delight in the States, even while locals muttered about vermin and rabies.

Fellow blogger Jack at Sequoia Gardens writes about the baboons who occasionally wreak havoc in his South African garden, and I find myself relishing the unfamiliarity of his homeland in a way that descriptions of similarly native species like phygelius or crocosmia would just not achieve.

So I am grateful to our little urban monkeys, desperately displaced as they are from their native habitat by human encroachment, for reminding me daily that, despite the clipped shrubs and English-style lawn that cover so much of Delhi, this really is a different country.

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One approach to sustainable garden design

The India Habitat Centre recently hosted an event led by noted French landscape architect Pascal Cribier. Called Garden, Nature or Landscape?, the workshop allowed Cribier to explain his design approach through a variety of projects.

For me, the most fascinating part of the day was Cribier’s description of what ecological design means to him. (He spoke poetically and passionately on the subject in his broken English, and would I suspect not entirely approve of this short and rather prosaic Anglo-Saxon summary of his views.)

Put simply, Cribier argued for the conservation of gardens. Not conservation in the usual sense of meticulously recording and expensively safeguarding important historical features; but conservation simply in the sense of keeping as much as possible of what was already on site. He does not believe in adding to landfill by ripping out plants and materials just to impose his own design on a garden. Instead he strives to keep what is there and just amend it. He gave the simple example of a brick wall which he did not like; instead of replacing it, he used the same bricks to build a wall in a different style. A more flamboyant example was a fussy little Victorian water feature he found in the garden he was redesigning at Woolton House in England, which he extended into a far more effective large pond while keeping the original feature at the centre.

A conserved but transformed water feature at Woolton House. Image from http://www.etab.ac-caen.fr

There was a second, equally important, part of this approach. Cribier also strives to create a design that will last, that will not in its turn get ripped out as uninspiring or too difficult to maintain. He almost starts with what he considers a realistic maintenance plan and works backwards. And his focus is on producing something that the owner and gardener will love and want to maintain; in this way the garden is more likely to persist.

Several of the young Indian landscape architects in the room pressed him on his use of non-native plants. But Cribier was unrepentant: it was ecologically more important to give clients a pleasurable garden that they would love and preserve, than to strive to recreate some lost ecosystem. He argued that nature is self-balancing, able to cope with disruption and change, and not in need of frantic attempts to return to what has been lost. To be fair, he did say that if France’s native flora was as beautiful as India’s, his attitude would be rather different; but providing enduring beauty was more important than a focus on native plants.

It was a fascinating account of one individual’s approach; not one I am sure I fully support (and certainly his argument that bees will visit hybridised double flowers as readily as native single ones seemed based on nothing more than a fervent wish that they should), but one which left all of us pondering on what really is good ecological practice in garden design.

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A modernist fortress

Today I am delighted to be a guest contributor on Lula Alvarez’s blog, On Botanical Photography. We have jointly produced a photo-essay on on the Barbican in London, Lula taking the wonderful photographs of this modernist fortress, with me supplying the accompanying text. For both of us, the Barbican is one of the most fascinating sites in the capital.

Here’s a photo I took last month from the London Eye, showing the three Barbican towers amidst the endearing jumble of architecture that makes up the City of London. For more on the Barbican’s remarkable intertwining of Brutalist architecture and lush landscapes, have a look at Lula’s blog.

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RHS gardens, Wisley

Some people are rather sniffy about the Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens at Wisley in Surrey: the entry fee and cafés are too expensive, the visitors are all middle-aged and middle class, the displays are too horticultural, the history of the site is not celebrated, the car park is impossible to navigate for the disabled.

All those criticisms have their merits. Yet on a warm day in late April, there are few more pleasant places for keen gardeners to spend some time. The site was first developed as an experimental garden in the 1870s. Today it is almost 100 hectares of display areas, from trained fruit, vegetable plots and alpines, to roses, a wild garden, various water features (including a canal designed by Geoffrey Jellicoe), and extensive trial fields. In summer and autumn, there are perennial gardens to enjoy by top designers Piet Oudolf, Penelope Hobhouse and Tom Stuart-Smith.

When we were there just before Easter, every Spring-flowering bulb, tree and perennial seemed to be in full bloom, all planted in big, heartening swathes: white daffodils, crab apples, pink tulips, lilacs, magnolias, pearl bush, epimediums, rhododendrons, a mass of tiny blue grape hyacinth, even the peonies were joining in.

The Bicentenary Glasshouse, opened in 2007, was full of exquisite displays, including some beautiful orchids, all laid out and labelled in a way that put the similar Grandes Serres at the Jardin des Plantes (about which I posted recently) to shame.

Despite the criticisms of Wisley, and despite the controversial changes the RHS is facing under its new Director General, Sue Biggs, it was difficult on that bright Spring day to do anything but enjoy these flower-filled gardens.

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A royal park for a royal wedding

Glimpse from the park of flags along The Mall, ready for the royal wedding procession

The procession for the royal wedding will run along The Mall between Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey, offering the newly-weds splendid views over St James’s Park. It is the oldest and most popular of London’s royal parks, and has an intimate link with the British monarchy and the romantic liaisons of kings of old.

Originally woodland of sufficient extent to furnish food for a hundred pigs, according to the Domesday Book, and then a site for a Hospital for Leprous Maidens, the area was turned into a royal hunting ground in the early sixteenth century. Beginning in the 1660s, it became a formal, French-inspired park and hub of the London social scene under Charles II and his successors. Finally the naturalistic public park that we know today was created by John Nash around 1828.

It was in about 1531 that the possibilities of this marshy site first drew the interest of the monarchy, in the larger-than-life figure of King Henry VIII. He was in the midst of his battles with Rome over attempts to annul his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, and was taking action that led rapidly to the English Protestant Reformation. Having acquired adjacent land from Westminster Abbey on which to build a new royal residence (the grand Palace of Whitehall, which was subsequently destroyed by fire), he saw the fields around the hospital as a potential site for another in the long line of royal hunting grounds, and as a place to woo Anne Boleyn, his future queen.

By 1532 the king had demolished the leper hospital and replaced it with St James’s Palace. Lovers’ knots, entwining the initials H and A (Henry and Anne), were engraved around some of the fireplaces. The land to the south was turned into a small private garden and a traditional hunting park. He also installed a tilting yard (for a popular equestrian activity of the day), a cockpit and a bowling alley. The whole area was surrounded by a “sumptuous wall of brick” to create a private royal pleasure ground.

Royal Cartographer John Norden’s map of Westminster dated 1593 shows St James’s Park in the top left hand corner, some sixty years after it was created.

A more solemn history attaches to the site by the time of King Charles I (1625–49). He was confined in St James’s Palace before being walked through the pleasure grounds to the site of his execution in front of the Banqueting House.

A detail from a print by Wenceslas Hollar of 1644, during the time of Charles I. It is still recognisably the park created by Henry VIII a century earlier.

Charles II’s triumphant restoration of the monarchy in 1660 after eleven years of the Commonwealth led to many political and social changes. He was careful to foster an image of himself as a man of the people, charming, nonchalant and seemingly uninterested in affairs of state, in contrast to his haughty father who made clear his belief in the divine right of kings. As part of his public relations strategy, Charles quickly had St James’s Park remodelled in the latest style, to turn it into a place where he could mingle engagingly with his subjects. As a result, as one writer has pointed out, of all the royal and famous people who are linked with the place, “Charles is more intimately connected with the Park than any other great personage.”

The French-influenced layout of St James's Park, in an engraving by Kip, c1710.

The new park was laid out in the style of French baroque gardens, with a grand canal à la française some 2,800 feet long by 100 feet wide, bordered by avenues and rows of single species trees (mainly elms), with more broad avenues radiating in a goosefoot pattern from the Palace of Whitehall, and two further grand avenues running along the north and south edges of the park, forming The Mall (site of the royal wedding procession) and Birdcage Walk respectively.

Given an ambiguous reference in a letter written around 1694, landscape historians love to debate who designed this new French-style park for the king. Received wisdom suggested for a long time that André Le Nôtre had produced the plan, although that now seems a rather preposterous idea. Whoever it was, St James’s Park became a vastly popular part of the social scene and achieved the king’s aim of allowing him to mix affably (and very visibly) with his subjects.  Charles made great play of opening up the royal park to the public, although there is evidence that at least some people had had access during the Commonwealth.

Charles II and Nell Gwyn, being observed by the disapproving John Evelyn, in a painting by Edward Matthew Ward, 1854.

Daily he would stroll along the avenues with his courtiers, or one of his mistresses, and was frequently seen feeding the ducks and pelicans that he had introduced onto the canal. The diarist John Evelyn rather disapprovingly records overhearing “a very familiar discourse” between the king and his mistress Nell Gwyn, who had been installed in a house close to the palace. So much did Charles enjoy his time wandering through the park that one of his courtiers remarked “there was as much of laziness as of love in all those hours which he passed among his mistresses …while a bewitching kind of pleasure called SAUNTERING, was [what] he [most] delighted in.”

An image from 1763 showing the sort of sauntering for which the park had become famous.

While I doubt we will see William or Kate sauntering much in St James’s Park, its close links with the various love affairs of English kings makes it a perfect backdrop to their nuptials.

Anther time I may write a little more about the history of this splendid place, from the wish of one monarch to turn the park into a turnip field, and its role in finding “idle fellows” to fight King George’s battles against the rebellious provincials in the American colonies, to the part possibly played by Capability Brown in designing the current naturalistic layout of the park.

View of Whitehall and the London Eye from today's St James's Park

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Happy St David’s Day

March 1st is the feast day of St David, the patron saint of Wales, my homeland.

Paris does not have many red dragons (the country’s heraldic emblem) or even, at this time of year, many leeks (the traditional emblem of Wales). But earlier today I saw this sunny little patch of Narcissus ‘February Gold’ by the church of St Philippe du Roule. The daffodil is an alternative Welsh emblem, chosen I think simply because it is so readily in flower on St David’s Day.

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant Hapus – Bonne Fête de Saint David – Happy St David’s Day!

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