Garden of Painterly Delights

Percy Horton: Suburban Garden, 1921
"A bright, blowy day in London. Blue sky, tumbling white clouds. The trees are budding in the parks, and even the brown Thames seems to sparkle. Could spring be coming? We are fed up with snow and floods and sad, bad news. Many of us—myself including—simply want to get into the garden. In tune with this mood, thank goodness, the Garden Museum in Lambeth is showing an exhibition called 'Sanctuary: Artist-Gardeners 1919–1939.' During World War I, when soldiers thought longingly of home, their minds often turned to the garden. Indeed, they made small gardens in the trenches, planting bulbs in empty brass shell-casings. In a catalog essay, the Garden Museum’s director, Christopher Woodward, quotes Ford Madox-Ford’s No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction (1929), on the soldier’s dream of return, not to a landscape but 'a nook rather,' at the end of a valley 'with a little stream, just a trickle level with the grass of the bottom. You understand the idea—a sanctuary.' ..."
NYBooks
Sanctuary: Artist-Gardeners 1919–1939

Harry Bush: Snowfall in the suburbs, 1940