Morris (1889-1982) was acclaimed as both an artist and a plantsman. He ran the East Anglian Art School with his partner Arthur Lett-Haines for more than 40 years and was an avid gardener who bred irises to award-winning standard.
From the early Forties onwards, he was raising 1,000 seedlings a year by hand-pollination; sifting and assessing them for vigour and form and using his artist’s eye to produce painterly colours, including pioneering soft pinks and muted yellows. His painting Iris Seedlings is at the Tate, although not on show.
Sarah’s chance find at Sissinghurst was a label for the iris ‘Benton Nigel’, which struck a chord as she was brought up in Suffolk near Benton End and remembered being taken to Red Cross teas in the garden as a child. Intrigued enough to start researching them, she soon found that there were more ‘Bentons’ where Nigel came from.
Not all of Morris’s seedlings made the grade of course, but Sarah has established that at least 90 were named, out of which 45 were registered with the American Iris Society, the official registration authority.
“The best he distributed to commercial outfits such as Orpington Nurseries and Wallace Nurseries, who sold them up until the early Seventies and showed them at Chelsea. The not so good ones he sold at garden openings in aid of the Red Cross.”
Wallace Nurseries 1948 catalogue with Morris irises
To date, she has found 25 named Morris introductions with good provenance, and five more that await further verification. “People have given me lots but unless they come with a name it’s difficult to say for sure what they are, so I’ve found botanic gardens, or other collections that have kept them labelled, to be the best sources.”
Sarah has been helped in her quest by husband Jim Marshall, himself a specialist grower of Malmaison carnations and former gardens adviser to the National Trust. He directed her towards Tony Venison, former gardening correspondent of Country Life, who knew Morris well.
Sarah also got to know the late Jenny Robinson, first president of the East Anglian Garden Group and Morris’s “plant executor”, charged with the safe distribution of his collection upon his death.
Meeting people who knew Cedric Morris, in sitting rooms and kitchens all over Suffolk – even on the terraces of Ipswich Town football club – has been one of the joys of the task. “They all speak so warmly of him. He was obviously very loved and the community at Benton End was a happy and successful one.” In the Tate’s catalogue for its Cedric Morris retrospective in 1984, Benton End is described as “a household where laughter was more abundant than average” and where the attitude towards Cedric “exceeded admiration and was one of intense devotion”. Hundreds of students passed through this school, the best known being Maggi Hambling and Lucian Freud, who studied there as teenagers.
The attitude towards Morris ‘was one of intense devotion’ (Friends of Beth Chatto)
Obligingly, Morris put the prefix ‘Benton’ to most of his irises, which made them easier for Sarah to unearth in old registers and catalogues, although she already knew that others, such as ‘Crathie’ (sometimes misspelt as ‘Craithie’) and ‘Edward of Windsor’ (his first pink) did not have it. His selections were often named after friends and even pets, adding personal zest to this horticultural detective story.
There was ‘Benton Stella’ for cookery writer Elizabeth David’s mother, ‘B. Baggage’ (both still unfound) and ‘B. Menace’ after Morris’s cats, and even one named after his pet macaw, ‘B. Rubeo’, described in the 1963 Orpington Nurseries catalogue as “a fine red plicata… with pale ivory falls, edged with red-purple”.
‘Benton Nigel’, it turns out, was significant, named for Beth Chatto’s friend Nigel Scott, whom she introduced to Morris, her lifelong friend and mentor.
He later went to live at Benton End and Beth has written that he shared “Cedric’s enthusiasm for plants to its fullest extent”, helping to “expand the garden to the peak of its development”. This and several others, including ‘Benton Cordelia’, ‘B. Lorna’ and ‘B. Caramel’, were relatively easy to find, having been listed in the Plant Finder in recent times. Others were much harder.
‘Benton Cordelia’ was easier to find than other irises (Marcus Harpur)
Sarah has read every iris yearbook from 1935 to 1966. Her search for Morris irises has led her from the bookshelves of the RHS Lindley Library, via the early catalogues of Orpington and Wallace Nurseries, to hunting grounds much farther afield.
“We have one group I call ‘The Flying Cedrics’ because they travelled the world together and eventually arrived with us by light aircraft!” Rhizomes were delivered by Anne Milner, another avid iris collector. She collected them from the botanic garden at Pruhonice, near Prague, for Sarah and brought them on the final leg of their journey from Gloucestershire to Suffolk in her husband’s private plane.
“Interestingly, this particular group of six or seven turned up in several countries,” says Sarah, “evidence that iris growers at the time all knew each other and exchanged stock.”
Sarah and Jim journeyed to Switzerland in 2007 to the Basel Botanic Gardens (formerly Brüglingen, now Merian Gardens) after a tip-off and were thrilled to find “an iris historian’s dream with 1,500 pre-1964 cultivars”.
That trip yielded rhizomes, sent on to Sarah some months later, of ‘Edward of Windsor’, ‘Benton Bluejohn’, ‘B. Daphne’, ‘B. Duff’, ‘B. Menace’, ‘B. Pearl’ and ‘B. Opal’. Last out of the parcel was one she was particularly waiting for: ‘Benton Judith’, a cultivar with deep purple standards and darker purple-black falls. Some of these same cultivars were also spotted in a collection in Oregon, America, and brought to Sarah via Aulden Farm, a Herefordshire nursery.
‘Edward of Windsor’ was Morris’s first pink (Marcus Harpur)
Sarah is immensely grateful that botanic gardens such as Merian and Pruhonice held onto – and, more importantly, maintained reliable records for – their collections and were generous enough to share them. Being granted National Collection status from Plant Heritage in 2006 certainly helped Sarah’s cause when requesting rhizomes.
Rigorous in her research, and much happier poring over paper than trawling the internet, Sarah has also appreciated the help received at the RHS Lindley Library. One outing there yielded an exciting find in the Historic Iris Preservation Society’s 1952 catalogue, when she turned to a colour photograph of ‘Benton Olive’. “I had to apologise for uttering a very loud ‘Bloody hell!’ when I found that. It gave me a reliable name – at last – for a cultivar I’d been given by two different friends of Morris’s.”
Sarah is cock-a-hoop that Howard Nurseries has taken on these irises, providing the know-how to bring them back to market. This year, stocks will be limited but will build over the next few years. She is passionate about them because she knows they perform well and will earn their place. “They’re reliable and disease-resistant and the wonderful thing about tall bearded irises is that they flower at the end of May when not a lot of other things do. Anyone could fit one into their garden.”
Care tips
- Irises prefer well-drained soil. If you garden on clay, mound up the beds so the rhizomes don’t sit in water.
- Feed plants once or twice a year with Vitax Q4 or a mix of Growmore and sulphate of potash. After flowering is the best, and also in March if you garden on a hungry soil.
- Divide plants straight after flowering. Give them a position in the front of a border – they don’t like competition.
Event
On May 13, Sarah Cook, artist Maggi Hambling and biographer Janet Waymark will discuss the life of Cedric Morris: Artist and Plantsman at the Garden Museum, London SE1 (020 7401 8865; Garden Museum).
Howard Nurseries’ stand (GPG2) will be in the Great Pavilion at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2015 (19-23 May). Please note that Howard Nurseries are wholesale suppliers only. A selection of Cedric Morris irises will be on sale at RHS Wisley during Chelsea week.
For further information, email Sarah Cook or call 01473 822 400.
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