Lamb House Garden

The garden of Lamb House occupies an acre, making it considerably the largest in the so-called “citadel” area at the heart of the compact and absurdly picturesque little Sussex hill-town of Rye. The casual passerby gets no inkling of the extent of this square plot, concealed as it is on one side by a weathered red-brick wall and on the other three by houses whose own narrow gardens back onto the Lamb House garden-walls. Isolated from the bustle of the surrounding streets and overlooked only by the nearby church-tower, it achieves a real feeling of peace and seclusion.

Henry James lived in Lamb House from 1897, when he was fifty-five, until his death in 1916. ¹ It is a modest brick-fronted Georgian house with period charm, perfectly combining elegance and simplicity, and almost the first thing James did was to examine its garden with Alfred Parsons, a friend who was both landscape painter and landscape gardener and who proved to be generous with his time and help. They were charmed with what they saw.

The garden, with its sunny lawn and small orchard, was apparently sheltered, surrounded by creeper-clad walls of warm red brick against which grew espaliers—figs, plums, apples, apricots, and pears—and James was particularly fond of a large, centuries-old mulberry tree by the south wall. ² Under the guidance of Alfred Parsons, a new layout of paths and lawn and borders was created, a walnut tree was planted, and many new flowers and shrubs were added. ³ Crocus, tulip, and hyacinth bulbs were planted that first year, and gradually jonquils, primroses, and lilies also appeared. On another friend’s advice, a rather empty flower bed was planted with lupins, tobacco plants, fuchsias, and geraniums. It soon became clear, however, that this garden was far less sheltered than it appeared, and James had a row of Lombardy poplars planted along its west side as protection from the prevailing northwest wind. A large greenhouse set against the south-facing garden wall, containing a great trumpet-creeper and some vines, was removed and replaced by a smaller one to the east of the house, where, among other things, chrysanthemums were grown in pots. ⁴ At the back of the house, accessible through a door in the wall, there was and still is a paved and walled courtyard, with which James was said to be highly satisfied. His great friend Edith Wharton recalled that some of her richest hours were spent under his roof, but it is interesting to find reference in her autobiography to “unkempt flower borders” and “thin-worn turf.” This may have been late in the summer of 1898, for, by September, after a summer of heat and drought, Henry James was writing that the lawn was “as a large sheet of brown paper, and very crumpled at that.”

The flowerbeds were edged with box, and there were roses, clematis, and laurels, while a well-established wisteria grew about the entrance to the garden-room; this study cum sitting room—slightly apart from the house—was to be a favorite place for writing, relaxing, and entertaining for both James and, after him, another novelist, E. F. Benson. Despite its destruction by a German bomb on August 18, 1940, it achieved a kind of immortality as the model for that center of activity in Benson’s Tilling novels, the “Mallards” garden-room, there presided over in turns by Mapp and Lucia. Henry James also of course used Lamb House in his writings: as Mr. Longdon’s country house in The Awkward Age, and in his uncharacteristically lighthearted ghost-story “The Third Person” (which I like to see as a tenuous link between the two writers, with its two apparently incompatible, and humorously described, elderly female inhabitants of the house).

The gardening journal Hortus published an article by Nancy-Mary Goodall in 1987 in which she convincingly argued, by considering in chronological detail the hero’s improbable—if not impossible—instant Venetian garden in The Aspern Papers, that clearly James was no gardener. She was right. He confessed himself to be...