Norah Lindsay

Portrait of Norah Lindsay by George Frederic Watts

Norah Madeline Lindsay , née Norah Madeline Bourke (born April 26, 1873 in Udagamandalam , India , † June 20, 1948 in Sutton Courtenay , Great Britain ) was an English socialite and garden designer.

Life

Norah Madeline Bourke was born in Ootacamund (now Udagamandalam, Tamil Nadu ) to Major Edward Roden Bourke and his Anglo-Indian wife Emmie Hatch . Her father, the younger brother of Richard Southwell Bourke , the 6th Earl of Mayo , who had been Governor General and Viceroy of India since 1869 , was stationed here as a member of the Inniskilling Dragoons . Norah had two sisters, Anne Kathleen Bourke (born June 9, 1872) and Madeline Emmie Louisa (born May 28, 1878), and two brothers, of whom Cecil Richard (born September 29, 1885) died in 1884. After her uncle was murdered in 1872, her father's career stalled and the family moved to London in 1875 , where they initially lived in a house in Montagu Square , Marylebone . Edward Bourke began working for his brother Harry, an investment banker at Brunton, Bourke & Co., to finance his wife's lavish lifestyle. In 1884 they moved to Cumberland Place, where Norah's second brother Nigel Edward Joycelin Bourke was born in 1886. The children received a proper upbringing, Norah learned to play the piano and French and was in good company. Her mother was a friend of the Crown Prince Edward , who wrote her numerous letters, and the Marquise de Granby, an artist. She was also friends with the illustrator Violet Manners , who made a portrait of her daughter.

Portrait of the young Norah Bourke by Violet Manners, lithograph

In 1895, at the age of 22, the flirtatious Norah married Henry Edith Arthur Lindsay (born April 9, 1866), seven years older than Henry Edith Arthur Lindsay (born April 9, 1866), the younger brother of her friend Violet Manners. He was without income of his own and since 1892 a lieutenant in the Gordon Highlanders in India. In 1891 he had at one zweijahrigen hunting stay in Ceylon with malaria infected, from which he suffered all his life. His cousin, Robert James Loyd-Lindsay, Lord Wantage, gave him the country estate Sutton Courtenay , then in Berkshire, on the occasion of his wedding . This gave the young couple their own residence. Henry Lindsay leased large parts of the estate in order to repair the Tudor manor house himself and to be able to finance his lifestyle. Henry furnished the interiors with stuffed hunting trophies from Ceylon and leached the historical panels himself, Norah designed the garden and gave parties and masked balls for politicians and artists. Wealthy students from nearby Oxford were also often invited, including Raymond Asquith and Julian Grenfell . With these "Olympians" Norah held absurd athletic competitions. However, the house was damp, cold, and drafty, and the bedrooms were infested with cockroaches. Although the garden was mostly untidy and full of weeds because there was no gardener but only daily paid helpers from the village, it was praised in glowing colors in an article in Country Life magazine in 1904 . Her sister Madeline describes that the yard was never swept and that withered flowers remained on the plants, which for Norah Lindsay added to the romantic atmosphere of the place.

In 1896 Norah Lindsay and Nancy Winifried Robina were born, four years later their brother David Ludovic Peter was born. In the spring of 1903 the garden was flooded by the Thames and the water seeped into the foundation walls, making the building even more humid. Henry Lindsay stayed increasingly in his hunting lodge and avoided the noisy parties and the constant flirtations of his wife, who ignored the state of the house. In view of the serious financial problems he resumed his army career, the couple now lived separately. Norah Lindsay received financial support from her younger sister, who was married to brewery owner and politician Samuel Howard Whitbread .

Norah Lindsay received financial support from her younger sister, who was married to brewery owner and politician Samuel Howard Whitbread . Gradually she raised her son Peter to take on the role of man in the house, as a butler, a craftsman, in the vegetable yard and in the garden.

Norah's father died in 1907, and her mother Emmie married a year later her old friend, the wealthy Edward Villiers, 5th Earl of Clarendon (1846–1914).

During the First World War, Norah Lindsay set up a few vegetable patches, and the family lived on what the housemaid cooked from the potatoes, vegetables and eggs. She paid little attention to what was happening at the front, but it depressed her that her garden was slowly becoming overgrown. She started an affair with a younger man, which improved her mood. From 1918 she began to rent the manor house as a summer retreat, as her money problems became increasingly precarious. However, she still had to make sure that the garden remained attractive, as it was the main draw of the rundown property. Lindsay first lived in London with her friends Ian and Jean Hamilton and later rented a small apartment for herself and her girl. She started selling plants and books to buy coal, but she continued to employ several girls, gardeners and a cook. While her children were repairing the house, she traveled to America with a friend.

After the war, her husband worked on the restoration of mansions, mainly as a carpenter, also as a photographer, and finally as an interior designer. In 1920 he filed for divorce and attempted to sell his property in Sutton Courtenay, but the mansion itself could not find a buyer. Norah stayed with friends at Taplow Court in Buckinghamshire . Allegedly she started an affair with the writer Hilaire Belloc , whose wife Elodie had died in 1910. Since she always abbreviated the names of her lovers in her letters, this cannot be clearly proven.

Her mother introduced Norah to her noble friends, and they invited her to their country estates. Since 1924, when Sutton Courtenay was also rented out in winter and a stay in Rome turned out to be Fiasco because she had to raise the heating costs here too, she earned her living by advising them on garden design. In the evening she was a party lady again and shone with witty conversation and piano playing, plus the rental income from Sutton Courtenay.

Norah Lindsay died of kidney cancer in 1948 after a long hospital stay in Sutton Courtenay . She was buried in local cemetery

Garden designer

While traveling with her husband to Italy and France before the First World War, Norah Lindsay visited the gardens there. She also had a large library of gardening books.

Her early style was influenced by William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll . Like the latter, she attached great importance to tasteful color combinations. She planted perennials in irregular spots to create a natural effect and bordered the wide borders with box hedges, following the Italian model. However, their plantings were "freer and more relaxed" than the Jekylls. She was also influenced by the Arts and Crafts style of William Morris . Tankard assigns her work entirely to the Arts and Crafts style, but without giving a reason.

After the war she visited France again, was enthusiastic about André Le Nôtre's formal style and began to integrate more topiary into her gardens. In her "Long Garden" in Sutton Courtenay, she planted pillars of yew trees. Visiting Exbury , Hidcote Manor and Cothay Manor also broadened her horticultural horizons. From 1923 Elen Wilmott introduced her to numerous new plants and their needs and gave her, unusually generous, plants from her garden in Warley Place .

Lindsay advised against strong color contrasts and recommended combining plants with similar colors in soft transitions. Her preferred colors were soft greens, gray, a brownish purple, and old pink. At Sutton Courtenay, she kept saturated blues and reds separate from scarlet and yellow. Furthermore, the shape of the leaves and the height of the plants should contrast. Plants should be placed so densely that the soil was not visible. The strict order of Jekyll's borders - large plants in the back, small plants in front - she broke up by occasionally bringing larger plants forward. Even for their time, their plantings were not revolutionary. It only slightly softened Jekyll's strict Victorian style by throwing some plants out of the ordinary and giving the whole thing a random, "wild" and lavish touch without changing the basic concept. She also popularized some new plants and used many variegated shapes. In Sutton Courtenay she mainly used thalictrum , hollyhocks, tall bellflowers, ox tongues and mullein as well as alstroemerias, rudkeckias, sunflowers and garden lupins, which were arranged in seemingly random stripes.

Gardens

• Veldes Castle ( Bled )
• Brdo Castle

Blickling Hall and garden

• Blickling Hall , Norfolk. For John Sales, this garden is Norah Linday's masterpiece; it has largely been preserved in its original form. Today he is looked after by the National Trust.
• Chirk Castle at Wrexham, Clwyd for Lady Howard de Walden
• Cliveden , Buckinghamshire for William Waldorf and Nacy Astor
• Ditchley Park , Oxfordshire for Ronnie and Nancy Tree, later Ronnie Tree and his second wife Marietta Peabody.
• Faringdon Castle , Berkshire for the eccentric composer Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners
• Fort Belvedere for the Duke of Windsor . He judged, "When you have money, she is the one to spend it on." He particularly appreciated her selection of roses. For the design of his garden in Moulin de la Tuilerie in Gif-sur-Yvette , however, he hired the professional garden designer Russell Page .
• Gleneagles Hotel
• Godmersham Park
• Hidcote Manor : Advice from Lawrence Johnston . According to John Sales, the color design of the discounts is largely due to the influence of Norah Lindsay. Johnston reportedly planned to bequeath the property to her, but she passed away before him.
• Kelmarsh Hall
• Lou Sueil in Èze on the Côte d'Azur for Consuelo Vanderbilt and Jacques Balsan
• Mells Manor , Somerset for Sir Horner
• Mottisfont Abbey , Hampshire, where parts of their gardens survived
• Philip Sassoons Port Lympne at Hythe in Kent
• Rhodes House , Oxford University
• Rushbrooke Hall for Lord Islington
• Serre de la Madone : Advice from Lawrence Johnston
• Trent Park , North London (now Middlesex University ) for Philip Sassoon
• Garden of the Renaissance - Villa Madama in Rome for Carlo, Count Dentice di Frasso, who acquired the property in 1925, and his American wife Dorothy Taylor Cadwell (1929).

Influence and judgment of posterity

Norah Lindsay's style had a particularly strong influence on Lawrence Johnston and Vita Sackville-West . Sackville-West admired the "posed casualness and the glorious, color-coordinated variety" of Lindsay's gardens, but didn't have the money to implement them in his own garden.

Since Lindsay did not publish any books about her design ideas and did not draw any plans, but instead planted plants directly or instructed the gardeners where to plant them, her contribution to garden design was largely ignored. However, from 1929 she wrote articles for Country Life , Vogue and Oxford and Cambridge Magazines and tried to sell articles to the publishing house Doubleday. From 1927 she worked on a book called "Garden Idyll", but the manuscript has disappeared.

National Trust gardening consultant John Sales believes Norah Lindsay is by far the most influential flower gardener in Britain. Between the world wars she was the best and most important designer of flower gardens. He characterizes her style as "Post-Jekyll". Tankard describes her as a master of garden design.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 15
2. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, p. 16
3. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 20
4. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 23
5. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 30
6. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 33
7. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 43
8. ^ ^{A b} Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 38
9. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 48
10. ^ ^{A b} Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 50
11. ^ ^{A b} Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 54
12. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 57
13. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 59
14. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 59
15. ^ Allyson Hayward, Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, p. 63
16. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 60
17. ^ Allyson Hayward, Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, p. 63
18. ^ Allyson Hayward, Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, p. 64
19. ^ Allyson Hayward, Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, p. 64
20. ^ Allyson Hayward, Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, p. 65
21. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 67
22. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 68f.
23. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 61
24. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 72
25. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 61
26. ↑ ^{a b c} Stephen Lacey: Norah Lindsay: a begetter of beauty (book review) , Dec. 7, 2007, The Daily Telegraph
27. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, p. 243
28. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, p. 244
29. ↑ "patches"
30. ^ ^{A b c d} John Sales: Shades of Green, my Life as the National Trust's Head of Gardens. London, Unicorn 2018, page 229
31. ^ Judith B. Tankard, Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Portland, Timber Press 2018 (revised edition), 215
32. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 79
33. ^ Judith B. Tankard, Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Portland, Timber Press 2018 (revised edition), 215
34. ^ Judith B. Tankard, Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Portland, Timber Press 2018 (revised edition), 215
35. ^ Allyson Hayward, Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, 86
36. ^ Judith B. Tankard, Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Portland, Timber Press 2018 (revised edition), 215
37. ^ Allyson Hayward: Norah Lindsay, the life and art of a garden designer. London, Frances Lincoln 2007, p. 242
38. ^ Charles Quest-Ritson: The English Garden abroad. Hammondswords, Penguin 1992, 212
39. ^ Charles Quest-Ritson: The English Garden abroad. Hammondswords, Penguin 1992, 210
40. ^ ^{A b c} John Sales: Shades of Green, my Life as the National Trust's Head of Gardens. London, Unicorn 2018, page 284
41. ^ John Sales: Shades of Green, my Life as the National Trust's Head of Gardens. London, Unicorn 2018, page 291
42. ^ John Sales: Shades of Green, my Life as the National Trust's Head of Gardens. London, Unicorn 2018, 138
43. ^ Judith B. Tankard, Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Portland, Timber Press 2018 (revised edition), 215