Just two miles upstream is an architectural gem: Chiswick House. It got a big thumbs up some three years ago in Upstream. Now it’s back on our radar because it is set in 65 acres of gardens.
And what gardens. Yesterday we walked through woodland to the cricket pitch, meeting a lot of cross-breeds many of whom I’d never heard of but were unfailingly friendly. Then we pottered past the obelisk* and over to Bollo Brook, which Lord Burlington widened in the 18th century so that it looks like a broad river – OK it’s not the Mississippi – teeming with waterfowl. There’s a storyboard so I can tell you that this is a male tufted duck. He swam around seigneurally as his missus took big breaths and did some bottom feeding.
It was a tranquil scene captured by PG Wodehouse in Full Moon.
The brook has a fine bridge and at the south end a cascade, that was not cascading yesterday. We pootled on stopping to smell anything interesting and peering into the house where a lead Sphinx couchant looked suitably inscrutable.
Next stop was the cafe: Bertie lapped up some water, Robert had a pot of Earl Grey and I lapped up a G&T. When I was growing up one of the many agreeable aspects of living at Barmeath were flower arrangements in the principal rooms. My grandmother was an accomplished gardener and a dab hand at flower arranging to boot. Her arrangements were naturalistic and it’s a style I aspire to. My sister usually has a spectacular vase of flowers in her hall and when I admire it she always says it looks too like the sort of thing you see in an hotel and not enough like our grandmother’s creations. Well, the cafe at Chiswick House sells bunches of flowers picked that morning in the gardens. We bought three (£10) and they make a welcome change from the mono-culture displays usually on show in the kitchen.
All good things come to an end and it was time to go home for lunch, past the Conservatory, the longest ever built in 1813 (96 metres), and the column but there was a surprise – the circus has come to town: Giffords Circus.
*”Former pupil likes editing column” ( Spectator Crossword 2413).
“..a lead Sphinx couchant”.
Where else, other than this blog, might such a phrase tickle the senses?
This is why I read your blog and, indeed, anticipate it, with daily pleasure.
Thank you.
Do I see, in the foreground of the photograph of your flower arrangement, a sculpted bronze gnu couchant? Also, and besides, does the painting in the background depict the foul smelling tanneries in the old medina of Fez? Almost certainly not, but I have to ask.
It is a bull in bronze by Tom Greenshields. I bought it for £139 in 1982 from a gallery in Bradford-on-Avon. The painting is of allotments behind Royal Crescent in Bath by Stephen Angel: “Mr Darke sees the Light”.
Fez/Bath – they’re often confused. Thanks for clarification on the bull couchant.