Friday 9 April 2021
Bonnie Robinson
As March progressed the small carpet of sweet violets on my plot produced hundreds of fragrant flowers. Only a few years ago I begged a few plants from a friend and they have spread with satisfying alacrity, enjoying the dappled shade of my plum trees. My violets are the common variety which grow wild in English woodlands and hedgerows but the sighting of a clump of white violets on a bank at Blenheim Palace led me to place an order with Shire Plants. They stock a superb range of heritage violets in whites, pinks and even yellows. I am currently anticipating the arrival of ‘Mrs R Barton’, white with violet streaks, ‘Baroness Alice de Rothschild’, raised from a seedling which appeared in Alice de Rothschild’s French garden in 1894, and ‘Orchid Pink’, a shamelessly pretty pink to delight my daughter.
Waddesdon Manor reveals the secrets of its kitchen in a new online exhibition In February, the history and secrets of Waddesdon Manor’s kitchen and the people who worked in it are revealed in a fascinating new online exhibition. A grainy black and white photograph, taken around 1900, not only shows just how accurately Waddesdon Manor’s impressive kitchen was restored in the 1990s, but also prompts an intriguing question; who are the people gathered around the very table that the photo is now displayed on? Catherine Taylor, head archivist, said: “We don’t know for certain who the staff in the photo are, but I’m fairly certain that Alice de Rothschild’s chef at the time the photo was taken was M. Bonnar, who died in 1915 in a car accident while in Brighton, where Miss Alice was spending the war.”