by Sue Shephard
Back at Winkfield, Connie enjoyed meeting the more mature students who came for day courses in cookery and flower decoration. Yet she found the flower-arranging controversy had penetrated even this sanctuary. One woman exclaimed at Connie’s great bowls of roses, dripping onto a satin tablecloth, ‘Oh, but we wouldn’t be allowed to do anything like that.’ ‘Why on earth not?’ Connie asked. ‘Because table flowers must be low and they mustn’t touch the table.’ ‘Who said so?’ Connie demanded to know. ‘Oh, it says so in the rules.’ Another young wife told Connie how she had been taken to task over her flower arrangement by a dinner guest who proceeded to tell her how she had ‘gone wrong’, then demonstrated in front of the other guests how it should have been done. The hostess and her husband both decided the ‘properly done’ arrangement was not nearly so nice. But the damage had been done and, she told Connie, ‘It’ll be a long time before I do my flowers for a party again. I’ll be too nervous.’ Connie despaired. Rules, competition and criticism, just as she had feared, had killed the art and lost all its spontaneity.
Connie had for too long been set on a pedestal, where she had shone brilliantly but where she now felt isolated and misunderstood. In the 1989 official history of NAFAS Pamela McNicol wrote about the birth of the flower-arranging movement in the Thirties and the postwar years: ‘Constance Spry brought her skills to grand occasions in palaces and stately homes, and Julia Clements [the flower arranger and writer] crusaded to open horizons to everyone. Groups of women up and down the country welcomed the new art of flower arranging.’
Connie had always thought of herself as ‘Everywoman’, someone who could mix and work with all kinds of people. But she had become a high-class brand name, associated with wealth and snobbery. Perhaps it was now too late to rehabilitate her image. Perhaps, as some of those who still remember her have suggested, she had become something of a snob, enjoyed being a bit grand and hobnobbing with royalty and the ‘cream’ of society. Perhaps there was a streak of Etty Fletcher in her. Recordings of her BBC radio performances demonstrate the classic clipped tones of the time. But her writing was always witty, irreverent and had the common touch.
One day in the late 1940s Connie had lunch with Mr Taylor, her publisher at J.M. Dent. She was feeling rather bruised from her recent experiences and did not readily agree to his proposal for a new book. ‘It is an awful mistake to commit oneself to print,’ she told him. ‘Why?’ he asked.
Because it isn’t until you’ve been greeted, or should I say accosted, with ‘Aren’t you the woman who says you should take all the leaves off flowers?’ or until you have been asked to admire an arrangement of daffodils with bunches of grapes because you ‘like fruit and flowers’, or until you have been reminded of your innumerable omissions, that you begin to see yourself as others see you and to realize that far from having advanced your simple views with lucent simplicity, you have in fact so expressed yourself that for your meaning to be clear your readers would need the gift of second sight.
Connie was being far too hard on herself; her books were wonderful examples of clarity, intelligence and inclusiveness. But it is not hard to imagine the kind of gardening ladies (and gentlemen) who were quick to find fault or omission in someone whose knowledge and experience far exceeded their own. Mr Taylor, though, managed to persuade her to embark on an ambitious new book, in two volumes and with colour photography. Armed with her publisher’s confidence in her, Connie launched herself happily into this new challenge, and in 1951 her Summer and Autumn Flowers and Winter and Spring Flowers were published to great acclaim. She was now an acknowledged expert on horticulture as well as flower arranging.
Roy Hay, editor of Gardener’s Chronicle, invited her to contribute regular articles on flower arrangement. She was already writing for several magazines, including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Woman’s Own, Housewife Magazine and Country Fair. With her son Tony’s assistance she wrote a correspondence course in flower arrangement, which sold all over the world and made a considerable profit. She continued to design vases with Flo Standfast and even designed ‘floral’ carpets, which were made up by a company in Worcestershire. Her youngest brother Lynton, a sound engineer who ran his own recording studios where many of Winston Churchill’s speeches were recorded, made several gramophone records of Connie giving lectures. She regularly appeared on radio and on the television series What’s My Line? with her great friend Isobel Barnett and Gilbert Harding. On one programme they had been discussing the return of the unfashionable house-plant. As they left the BBC’s Lime Grove studios, Connie noticed an ancient aspidistra growing up the reception wall; she tapped Harding on the arm and said, ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’
The Chelsea Flower Show, cancelled during the war, was resumed in 1947. In 1953 the BBC invited Connie to join Roy Hay and other gardening experts to tour the exhibits and make observations. Asked what most appealed to her, she replied that although her eye was attracted to the glorious, glimmering exhibits of flag irises, her imagination was ensnared by the more restrained varieties with their ‘shy beauty, slender grace, bearing flowers of muted tones, bronze tinged with violet, misted purples and cloudy pinks’. She told listeners that if she could have some of these irises, plus some of the shell-pink peonies she had seen on a nearby stand, and be allowed to arrange them together, then her day would be made. She fell into nostalgic memories over plants, ‘the flowers we flower decorators made so free of in those far-off and apparently halcyon days’. She talked of past glories: of the superabundance of flowers available before the war, of the lavish blooms that arrived daily from the Continent and from Africa, and of the exotics sent up from the hothouses of English stately homes, so many of which were now empty or gone. But she was always optimistic, and saw at Chelsea the energy and promise of an exciting future: ‘The times do sometimes seem out of joint,’ she said. ‘I want the flowers of yesteryear with this year’s opportunity.’
Although she had loved the stark severity of Thirties modernism – the steel and glass furniture and uncluttered rooms – Connie mourned the lost beauties of craft-made things, even more, now, in the postwar mass-produced age. It seemed so difficult to furnish a room in an individual way unless you were very rich. The only way left to express individuality in this bland world was, she thought, through flowers: ‘The repetitive patterns and designs one sees in the shops today make me yawn with an incurable exhausting boredom, everything looks alike, so impersonal, banal, a welter of ordinariness.’ Even in flowers there was the commercial search for brighter colour, outstanding size, brashness; the subtler shades and graces of old flowers were in danger of neglect.
Connie had great respect for any gardener who grew purely for personal pleasure. And she would have been in complete sympathy with organic and ecologically friendly gardening – early on, she had chosen to follow the renowned William Robinson’s example of wild gardening. She always disliked regimented flowerbeds and over-tidy gardens. She rarely dead-headed if the seedpods might be useful later, or if the flowers, such as hydrangeas, dried into interesting material; and she much preferred to leave the daisies to ‘decorate a not too closely cut lawn’. Most of all she loved her floppy, unruly roses, so greedy for space but still possible to grow well even in the smallest garden if its owner had sufficient love, understanding and energy. She recalled seeing on the busy main road up to London a ‘covey of wartime prefabs’, one of which had been transformed into a little miracle of beauty: the front garden was filled with roses, in a confusion of colour that seemed to encircle and almost swallow up the little home. They had clearly been well fed with the ‘good stuff’ of manure, which had probably entailed great sacrifice to afford. It reminded Connie of her own attempts as a child to gather horse manure from the road with a shovel; but those days were long gone, and ‘now there is nothing there but petrol fumes’.
Rex Murfitt, a New Zealander, was only twenty-six when Connie took him on at Winkfield to replace Walter Trower, who was finally due to reti
re in 1950. Murfitt was amazed by Connie, recalling, ‘I do not know how she found the time to accomplish her enormous daily workload. Small, always impeccably dressed, her hair stylish and tidy.’ He was also surprised to be told that as the head gardener he was expected to give gardening classes. He was flattered at the large number of ‘young ladies’ who joined his classes ‘until I found out that the alternative class was in laundry skills’. He also liked Rosemary Hume and found her to be a kind, gentle person and quite unassuming. He particularly enjoyed being asked to join her cookery class to test the results of a meal cooked on the vast Aga in the teaching kitchen. ‘It was a tough job, I admit, but someone had to do it!’
Murfitt recalled: ‘When I first joined the staff, the layout and garden work had already begun and some of the planting was under way.’ The garden was still struggling to recover from wartime neglect. Because of the heavy demand for cut flowers, the beds where vegetables were once cultivated were now full of annuals, dahlias, bulbs and the now famous kale. The students would go round cutting their own flowers, while the rest were sent to the shop in London. The main paths, made from old flagstones that Connie had dug up from the kitchen, were bordered by boxwood hedges and decorated with roses trained along swags of rope strung between wooden posts. A massive wistaria was pulled out away from the wall and draped over poles to make a bower. An ancient walled garden built of weathered terracotta brick was covered with espaliers and cordons of peaches, apricots and choice French pears. A substantial number of cuttings of Connie’s old-fashioned roses occupied one of the quadrants within the old garden, planted nursery-like in rows, waiting for permanent homes.
When they had moved from Kent to Winkfield Place and Trower had been instructed yet again to move the garden, he had been very worried about Connie’s precious old roses and was not hopeful that the older specimens would survive the move. Connie wrote to Graham Stuart Thomas, then the leading authority on roses – particularly the old-fashioned and French varieties – to ask if he would propagate some to ensure their perpetuity. Curious to meet Mrs Spry the great flower arranger, Stuart Thomas invited her to visit his rose nursery at Cobham, Surrey. He was surprised to meet someone who knew as much if not more than he did about these unfashionable and often rare plants. ‘The long French names flowed from her, enthusiasm was at bursting point; a few glances at the little lot we had collected drew forth some remarks, that, while they were not disparaging, made me realize I had little to show. There were no half-measures with Mrs Spry – a long and growing friendship proved this over and over again.’
When Stuart Thomas first saw Connie’s roses he was convinced that there was ‘nothing like them today in horticulture; they had been sadly neglected by just that generation that could make best use of them.’ He was overwhelmed by the extent and wealth of her collection: ‘She had assiduously collected her roses from French and American nurseries and from gardens here and there, in days before the war. She had many sumptuous varieties.’ Many of the rarest varieties lost on the Continent during the war, he noted, were safely growing in Connie’s garden. The only other comparable collections, though they were far less comprehensive, were those of Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst, Norah Lindsay at Sutton Courtenay and Leonard Messel (Oliver Messel’s uncle) at Nymans.
He would never forget his first visit to Park Gate, Stuart Thomas wrote. Before being allowed into the garden he was taken inside the house, where on an oval marble table a satin cloth of palest green was spread. In the centre was an almost overwhelming bowl of exotic violet, lilac, purple and maroon roses spilling over the edges on to the cloth. ‘An indescribably rich contrast was given by the dusky tones of the velvety petals, and the shining satin cloth.’
After the move to Winkfield, Stuart Thomas continued to visit and check on his propagated cuttings and talk roses with Connie. When Rex Murfitt first met him, he had assumed he was instrumental in obtaining the collection for Mrs Spry: ‘He knew these roses so well he could identify many by the leaf, and others by the habit of the branches – he did not need to see the flowers.’ Murfitt was surprised to be told that Mrs Spry was totally responsible for creating the collection herself, over many years in her previous gardens.
Like Park Gate, Winkfield had an orchard of old apple trees. Unfortunately, many had died from neglect during the war, but in their place Connie planted old-fashioned and climbing roses. She had often grown climbers to sprawl over living fruit trees, having seen how effective it could look in Norah Lindsay’s rose garden. But disaster struck in the spring when caterpillars started devouring the apple-tree leaves and then moved swiftly on to wreak havoc among the roses. In despair, Connie summoned Stuart Thomas to see the destruction and offer advice. His verdict was that she must choose between roses and apple trees. The trees produced few apples, but without them the already dull garden would look empty and flat. So it was decided to prune them into a good shape, then kill them by bark-ringing and use them as supports for various climbing and rambling roses and clematis.
For Connie, who always loathed to kill a plant or cut down trees, it seemed a drastic action. But she took courage and got Murfitt to ring them, cutting a neat little band a few inches wide and a foot or two from the base of the tree. But, Stuart Thomas pointed out, this would result in a glorious and ever-recurring crop of suckers, so they had to start again, this time taking a ring of bark a few inches below ground level. The following spring, Connie wrote: ‘Like a last swan-song or death rattle, the apple trees put out a flush of leaves and blossom, a ruffle of fresh young growth which seemed to have tempered our sense of guilt.’ She had planted sixteen roses to cover the eight dead trees, including ‘New Dawn’, ‘Albertine’, ‘Violette’, ‘Adelaide d’Orléans’, ‘La Perle’ and ‘Amethyst’. By the next summer, the trees were clothed in great swathes of these roses and she could almost forgive herself for her ‘reckless and murderous’ action.
Much of Connie’s day was now spent in her office doing ‘admin’ and writing her books and lectures. One student remembered that she always had a small glass containing just one flower on her desk, not for ornament, but as a botanical specimen to study. But her happiest hours were still spent in her garden: ‘She did not do much hands-on gardening,’ recalled Murfitt, ‘but it was not unusual to find her half buried in a hedge or coppice, gathering huge branches for her wonderful arrangements.’ She remained as ruthless as ever in her demands on the gardens for material; it had always been a bone of contention between her and her gardeners, as Murfitt recalled: ‘She was fully prepared to raid the entire garden for her fruit and flower creations. Nothing was overlooked.’ But he admired her skills and determination:
There was no limit to her imagination. I grew lots of dwarf, brightly coloured gourds which she would pile to overflowing in large bowls. She often used them for what she called her kitchen parties and, on several occasions, businessmen’s lunches. When there were no vegetables available in her own garden, she would buy exotic fruits, grapes, oranges, lemons, and even edible mushrooms. Once I saw her use the two halves of a coconut.
Occasionally there would be a flurry of activity when she worked for hours making one of her huge arrangements in the drawing-room. Her friend the designer Herman Schrijver recalled: ‘When doing an arrangement she was such a perfectionist. She would tear them to pieces and do them, again and then again and then again. I loved to watch her hands, covered in rings, and she had a bracelet which must have had a hundred pieces making jangling sounds whenever she moved.’ When these mammoth sessions were finished, a photographer would then busy himself with taking pictures for the books. ‘She shared all the fetching and carrying with her assistants, to watch her work left no doubt she knew the business from beginning to end. It was impossible not to be influenced by what was happening all around.’ These photography sessions were important, and Connie spent hours poring over the negative plates and prints before she was satisfied with her choice. Gradually she experimented with colour, but was never happy
with the fish-paste pinks and lurid greens of the early hand-tinted black-and-white photographs.
Beverley Nichols, who continued to be a great support and friend, shared Connie’s passion for regale lilies and was so proud of his own summer displays that on the first Sunday in July he held an annual ‘lily party’ to celebrate their beauty. ‘What a good idea to give a party for your best and loveliest flowers,’ Connie wrote, though for her it would have been the old roses, ‘or the philadelphus mantled in blossom and the white delphiniums’ pale spires in the half dark. White flowers in the evening light are excuse enough for any party, especially if there are lilies and tobacco plants, a cascading lace of white wistaria and white globes of light which are peonies.’
Like her past mentor Norman Wilkinson, Nichols was someone with whom Connie could share ideas and discuss flower arranging and gardening. She copied his scheme for arranging sweet peas in blocks of colour. He also enjoyed exploring junk-shops with her, and recalled how one day when they were prowling around a shop in Windsor Connie found an old Italian tazza on a dusty shelf, carved from a marble that was almost black and veined with streaks of violet. ‘She picked it up, held it to the light and asked, “What would you put in this?” At random I replied, “Purple grapes.” She nodded. “Of course. But what else?” I suggested deep red roses, terracotta tobacco flowers and Black Prince dianthus, which is white, flecked with dark violet.’ Connie took the tazza home and made a design of precisely these plant materials but, with a touch of her own genius, she added a long spray of tiny brilliant-scarlet currant tomatoes. She had this arrangement photographed in hand-painted colour and included it in Summer and Autumn Flowers.