Publications

The Garden
October 2003

Priceless record of The Dyffryn

Early 20th-century watercolours are now helping in the restoration of a listed garden. By Brent Elliott

Illustrations: RHS Lindley Library

All but a small handful of the Library’s collection of paintings and drawings consists of plant portraits. Of the few garden scenes, the most important is a group of watercolour views made in the1920s by Edith Helena Adie (1865 - 1947), who studied at South Kensington and the Slade, and exhibited at the Royal Academy and elsewhere from 1892 to the 1920s. In her later years, she moved to Bordighera, on the Italian Riviera, and taught painting there.

Then in 1922, Reginald Cory, the Welsh millionaire and gardening enthusiast (see ‘A priceless legacy’, The Garden, October 1998, pp716 - 9) commissioned her to depict his gardens at The Dyffryn, near Cardiff. The watercolours came to the RHS as part of Cory’s bequest in 1936.

While most of the drawings that Cory bequeathed were catalogued immediately and placed in the picture collection, the Adie scenes, presumably because they were not plant portraits, were put to one side.

In the early 1990s, these watercolours were discovered in the basement, wrapped in brown paper, and were then cleaned and properly added to the collection.

Today the Dyffryn Gardens are being restored, and copies of Adie’s views have been made to help with the restoration work. As so often happens, the architectural part of the gardens is mostly extant and identifiable, but without the aid of such illustrations, it would have been nearly impossible to work out how the gardens had originally been planted (see RHS archives help Dyffryn, News, p741).

Brent Elliott is RHS Librarian and Archivist

The RHS Lindley Library holds more than 50,000 books, 1,500 periodicals, 25,000 botanical drawings, and the UK's largest collection of horticultural trade catalogues.

The works shown are held in the picture library of the RHS Lindley Library and may be consulted at the London branch at 80 Vincent Square, London, and is open to the public Monday - Friday, 9.30am - 5.30pm.
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