Tea at Trianon: A Welsh Garden

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, August 9, 2025

A Welsh Garden

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From House and Garden:

Visitors were queuing up at the gate last summer to see Sarah Price’s garden, when it opened for the first time as part of the National Garden Scheme. I, like everyone else, was intrigued to see what this famously discreet and unassuming designer had done, having first visited the garden in 2015, two years after she moved there from London. Situated on the outskirts of Abergavenny with views of the Blorenge mountain, the house had belonged to Sarah’s grandparents, so the garden had a certain character that she was keen to retain. For several years, she simply lived with it, creating a vibrant ornamental kitchen garden within its walls, and managing existing shrubs and trees in the wider garden by clipping and gently shaping them.
In the walled garden, Sarah wanted initially to recreate the ethos of Priona, an interesting and beautiful garden created by the late Dutch plantsman Henk Gerritsen in the Netherlands. There, nature and all its processes were embraced within a structured framework of hedges, brickwork and mown paths. But she found managing it in this way was too labour intensive: ‘It needed a constant gardening presence to stop it looking too wild.’ So, in 2016, she redesigned this area, adding a top layer of crushed rubble, gravel and sand to create a low-nutrient substrate in which drought-tolerant plants could thrive. The result is breathtaking – a remarkable, ever-changing work of art with a community of plants interacting in a fine-spun mix of subtle colours and textures, alive with insects and birds. (Read more.)

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