A sixteenth-century house, Benton End near Hadleigh, was the home of Cedric Morris and his lifelong partner Arthur Lett-Haines (1894–1978). Here, the pair established the radical East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing – a place where art, horticulture, and community thrived side by side.
Around the 1950s, Morris created a ‘paradise of pollen and paint’ within the old walls of Benton End, the first naturalistic garden in Britain, with rare plants from Morris’s travels to the Mediterranean and beyond woven between bursts of the irises whose colours he mixed like paint. Beth Chatto – Cedric’s protégé, once called it, ‘a bewildering, mind-stretching, eye-widening canvas’
After Morris died in 1982, the art school became a private dwelling and the garden was abandoned. In 2021, Benton End was gifted to the Garden Museum by Rob and Bridget Pinchbeck, who bought Benton End in 2018 from a private owner. The Pinchbecks entrusted the Garden Museum to restore Benton End and revive Cedric and Lett’s vision of gardens and art, learning and friendship.
The garden is currently being restored through the vision and skill of James Horner, funded by a charitable trust. Fortuitously, the garden was never dug up and many of Morris’s rare bulbs were discovered ‘sleeping’ under the grass. Over the past two years, the Horner’s team has recorded surviving plant collections, and the rich biodiversity on the site. With much foresight, Morris appointed a plant executor to pass on his plants. John Morley and the late Beth Chatto have nurtured Morris’s distinctive snowdrops, poppies, and succulents – now ready to return to Benton End. According to the Garden Museum, Sarah Cook VMH, will be donating her priceless collection of thirty varieties of Cedric Morris iris to the garden, many of which carry the Benton prefix.
To return Morris’s plants back to Benton End and to plant a garden in which we can train a new generation of horticultural students, the Garden Museum is appealing for funds. Garden designer, Sarah Price has been a key collaborator on the project as Garden Advisor, drawing plans for the garden but support is now needed to bring the garden back to life again.
“We want to make places where artists and students can set up easels, where Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling once drew. Vitally, if we are to make the walled garden accessible to everyone we need to lay a path of 250 metres winding through the gently sloping loam. We are just £125,000 from reviving a garden which might have been lost for ever – and opening to you next year,” explains the Museum.
