I was asked to interview Eugenie Vronskaya in the courtyard of the RA as part of the festivities of Mayfair Art Weekend.   She was trained at the Krasnopresnenskaya School of Art, an interdisciplinary art school in Moscow with a system of training equivalent to that of the Bauhaus.   She arrived in England in 1989 after being given a six-month instead of a two-week visa (they were more generous in those days) and, during the six months, attended a residency at Pine Plane in upstate New York under Anthony Caro.   After studying at the Royal College of Art, she retreated to the Highlands, but is now again based in London painting portraits, of which an extensive series are currently on display in John Martin Gallery in Albemarle Street, including some very recognisable art world figures:-

We ended the afternoon drinking cocktails prepared by Gimlet, listening to madrigals performed by I Fagiolini and sprawled on the grass in Kim Wilkie’s inverted Mount known as Orpheus:-

I was asked to speak with Tessa Traeger at the Garden Museum Literary Festival about her exhibition A Gardener’s Labyrinth, which I was involved in commissioning when Director of the NPG, opened in the Summer of 2003, and is now being shown at Boughton House as part of its summer programme.   She reminded me of how it came about.   After we had commissioned a series of cooks to hang in the basement café in 1998, the Trustees thought that it would be appropriate to commission a series of gardeners.   I met Tessa at Hadspen, which had been the garden of Penelope Hobhouse, and realised that she was deeply knowledgeable about plants and gardens, as well as being a brilliant photographer, particularly of food.   The list evolved from the one originally drawn up by the Board of Trustees, to include artists like Ian Hamilton Finlay and Andy Goldsworthy, plantsmen, and gardeners from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.   Roy Strong thought the list was passé, but I thought it showed the longevity of gardeners since at least five of the sitters, including Roy, were in the room.

We admired the small exhibition about the garden at Boughton in the unfinished wing which provides a resumé of its history:  beginning with Sir Edward Montagu who built the Long Gallery in 1579, stocked with apricot trees from London.   By 1611, there were garden terraces.   Then Ralph Montagu, after serving as Ambassador in Paris, created water gardens, cascades and parterres – ‘grand gardens, an extensive canal, and extraordinary water jets’.   William Stukeley visited and described it in 1710.   The Mount was created in the 1720s.   After the death of the second Duke in 1749, it went into a long sleep, only now being comprehensively restored by the current Duke, helped by Kim Wilkie, in such a way that it is a strange mix of French formality, still with avenues of Hatfield Tall limes and expanses of water, leading to The Mount, but interspersed with immaculate English lawns and with fields of sheep beyond:-

Alan Hollinghurst gave a brilliant talk on the windblown Mound about the gardens of his youth, beginning with his parents’ garden at Faringdon in Berkshire, and the nearby Faringdon Park with its coloured peacocks, and going on to memories of his parents next garden in Cirencester, very precisely described and remembered, as well as, again, an adjacent country house garden in Lord Bathurst and Alexander Pope’s Cirencester Park;  and how these gardens experienced in memory informed his later literary descriptions of gardens in his novels.