Summer Garden Lionel Bulmer
This wonderful, warm painting of two women in the garden must, surely, have been executed as an immediate response to hours of sunshine, pleasure and peace, spent in a garden known and loved, perhaps in late May, on one of those days when the prospect of weeks of summer to come seems to be so full of promise. The array of green, gold, umber and terracotta is extraordinary and applied with a swift and certain touch.
The garden is likely to be that which Bulmer and Green developed around their lovingly-restored cottage in Onehouse, the hamlet near Stowmarket, in which they had lived since the late 1950s. They had cleared the densely-overgrown land round the cottage and had created what others have described as an ‘eden’, a paradise. The artist, Fred Dubery, a friend who, in 1968, also came to live near Stowmarket, just a couple of miles from Onehouse, observed that, ‘Lionel and Margaret were great plantsmen. During the summer they always set aside part of the day to work in the garden’[1]. And, so, it is not surprising that, amongst the lush vegetation of this ‘eden’, we might be able to spot the stems of Spiraea ‘Arguta’, loaded with white blossom (which gives the plant the popular name of ‘Foam of May’, or ‘Bridal Wreath’); I am also inclined to suggest that we can see, in the pale blue splashes of colour near the front of the border on the left, a group of bearded irises which flower at the same time as the spiraea, in late May and early June. Are they, by any chance, examples of what we now know as ‘Benton irises’? By that, I refer to the numerous irises bred by Cedric Morris, at his radical art school and garden in Benton End (formally known as the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing), just a few miles away from Stowmarket. Cedric Morris was not only an artist but also a passionate gardener, committed to breeding plants - like bearded irises - which displayed a range of subtle colour and elegant habit hitherto unknown. It seems highly likely that Bulmer and Green were enticed by the promise of Benton End. And these irises in the picture? In recent years there has been a committed effort to rediscover some of the Benton irises which have long been lost; and there is a lovely, pale blue iris, found in Beth Chatto’s famous Essex garden - a plant given to her by Morris himself - which may well be one of the originals. And – I have now persuaded myself that Bulmer and Green were growing Benton irises in their garden.
What remains most important about this picture, however, is the mysterious sense that we have been privileged to have a glimpse into this moment, this slice of life well-lived: a quality of enchantment which beguiles in so many of Bulmer’s paintings in the later decades of the 20th century.
[1] David Buckman quotes Fred Dubery, December 1st 2003, Obituary for Margaret Green, The Independent
39.5cms x 49.5cms
48.5cms x 59cms