Introduction

“It is useless to try to describe what he was ‘like’— Painter, Gardener, Scholar”. Infinitely loving and yet essentially ‘a cat that walked alone’.”

This display uses items from the Giles Waterfield Archive to explore the life and achievements of the artist and landscape gardener, Humphrey Waterfield. Giles Adrian Waterfield (1949–2016) was a distinguished scholar, museum director, and writer. His Archive was donated to the Centre in 2017 and—alongside material relating to almost every aspect of Waterfield’s life—also contains material concerning his uncle, Humphrey Waterfield.

Trained as an artist, Humphrey Waterfield was also an accomplished gardener, developing his skills initially at Hill Pasture, Broxted, Essex—the garden he began to construct in 1936—and subsequently at the Clos du Peyronnet in Menton-Garavan, on the Côte D’Azur.

The display draws, in particular, upon four categories of unpublished material in the Giles Waterfield Archive, all of which were written by Humphrey Waterfield’s lifelong friend and fellow gardener, Agnes “Nancy” Dalrymple Tennant: her memoirs of Humphrey Waterfield; a history of the garden at Hill Pasture; 2 the memoirs of Nancy Tennant herself; 3 and the letters Tennant wrote to Waterfield. 4 It also incorporates research undertaken by the garden historian, Jean Cornell.

The Giles Waterfield Archive has not yet been catalogued but is open to researchers. Further information about the collection can be found on the Centre’s website.