PAINTING PARADISE

My garden is the nearest I get to paradise.  It is my sanctuary.

Years ago I went – I don’t know when – to see Painting Paradise, the Art of the Garden at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, with plant and garden paintings gathered by the royals over the centuries.   I loved the manuscripts of Islamic gardens with octagonal ponds and chenar (plane) trees, lovers and flowers (their deep symbolism barely mentioned in explanatory notes).  Ditto Rembrandt’s painting of Christ as a gardener, complete with trowel.   Ditto some medieval gardens.

Then royal and aristocratic grandeur.  We got to 16^th and century baroque gardens for show and prestige, knot gardens, 17^th and 18^th landscape gardens creating an idealised countryside with temples and waterfalls, then Edwardian herbaceous borders, pastel and pretty – all interesting historical stuff, and inspiring in reality, but in these paintings the soul had turned grey in its cage.