The Garden History Blog

The Emperor Rudolf II as Vertumnus by Archimboldo  Image courtesy of Skokloster Castle, Sweden

We’re probably all familiar with  funny faces like these  although I suspect that most of us don’t know much more about them or the artist, except perhaps that his name was Arcimboldo.

The obvious question is why  a serious court artist for three emperors  should turn his hand from conventional portraits to ones  made up entirely of objects such as flowers, fruit and vegetables. It seems such a bizarre thing to do yet,  so what on earth was going through his mind when he painted such pictures, and what was going through the mind of the people who were looking at them?

Arcimboldo’s Four Seasons [sources and links to each painting can be found later in the post]

Last  week I explored the history of the former royal palace of Eltham, one of the favourite residences of medieval monarchs which  was later almost abandoned and fell into decline before being rediscovered, redesigned  and revitalised in the 1930s by Stephen and Virginia Courtauld.

Today’s post  is going to look at its history after the Courtaulds left in 1944, and in particular how the gardens have been given a new lease of life – dare I say – a second resurrection – over the last 30 years under the guardianship of English Heritage.

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Image courtesy of PlaceinPrint

Easter is a difficult time for bloggers, especially if you’re not someone of faith, so having looked at Easter lilies, Easter eggs, even bunnies I was running out  of obvious things to cover.  Of course the central theme of the Christian festival is resurrection so I hope no-one will be offended  if I take that for my theme in a more secular sense.

I took a party of my research students to Eltham Palace recently and at first I thought I’d do a piece about how, like so many other historic  sites Eltham is always on the lookout for ways of making money and bringing in a new audience and how Easter is a good time to do that with  Easter egg trails etc, even though it often impacts badly on the site.

Image from the English Heritage webpages for Eltham

Then I had a brainwave, and it  wasn’t  to do with these Easter events but instead it was about the resurrection of this  former mediaeval royal palace and its gardens, not once but twice in less than a hundred years.

Postcard from a private collection, showing the approach to the palace c1900

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Rafflesia arnoldii
(c) ccgfh, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

I hope you didn’t hear Radio 4 last Monday morning at 9. If you did you can stop reading now…or maybe you were as absorbed as I was and want to find out even more about Rafflesia.  “Start The Week”| is not a programme I usually listen to but this week it was all about plants, and had the inspirational botanist Chris Thorogood from Oxford Botanic Garden  talking about his latest trip to south east Asia to help conserve this extraordinary plant which has the largest flowers in the world.

As soon as the programme had finished I started this post and if you read on you’ll see why,  even though its unlikely you’ll ever be able to grow one at home, or even see one in one of our great botanic gardens any time soon.

Rafflesia mira (c) eazytraveler – some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

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