CEDRIC MORRIS was a modern Arcadian: that is, he lived for the present. In spring and summer, he painted and gardened at Benton End, in Hadleigh, Suffolk; each winter, he headed south to Mediterranean or African shores. Shortly before his death in 1982, at the age of 92, he tore up the photographs of himself taken in Man Ray’s studio in 1920s Paris, when his dancing with the socialite Duff Twysden—and his looks—made the clunky Ernest Hemingway jealous enough to mock Morris and his lifelong lover Arthur Lett-Haines—or ‘Lett’—in the night-club scene in The Sun Also Rises (1926).
Morris did not miss his beautiful youth. But he did care about what happened to the plants he had grown at Benton End, a Tudor house bought in 1940 to become an art school. Beth Chatto, his protégé, would compare the walled garden there to a ‘collector’s cabinet’.
At this year’s RHS
