Garden To Canvas in Country Life Magazine 14 May 2025
"It doesn't happen every day that a gardener curates an art exhibition, but James Horner is not any (head) gardener. He looks after Benton End, Cedric Morris's former home near Hadleigh, Suffolk, which was given in 2021 to London's Garden Museum. In the past two years, Mr Horner and his team have reintroduced many of the varieties Morris had planted and painted during his time there so it felt natural for art dealer Philip Mould to call upon him to guest-curate an exhibition on the artist.
Morris, who lived at Benton End with his partner, Arthur Lett-Haines, combined his talent for painting flowers and landscapes with a genuine passion for horticulture. During his artistic retreats abroad, he collected rare specimens that he brought back to Benton End, where he specialised in breeding tall bearded irises, naming 90 cultivars and even winning the Dykes Medal for his 'Benton Cordelia'.
Morris embraced the naturalistic style in his garden and was a pioneer of sustainability, fiercely opposing the use of pesticides. All this filtered into his art. As Christopher Neve put it in the April 26, 1984 issue of COUNTRY LIFE, 'he liked plants for their statuesque formal qualities, even their ferocity, and painted them with pudgy, frontal insistence ... because he had known them all as individuals from the soil up'. Celebrated in the late 1920s, he had fallen out of fashion by the late 1930s, but is definitely enjoying a revival now, his environmental and artistic messages resonating in equal measure. His Suffolk home will reopen to the public in 2026. Ahead of that, 'Garden to Canvas: Cedric Morris & Benton End' brings to life the flowers he so loved, at Philip Mould & Co, London SW1, May 20-June 18."
