A painterly palette

Designer Dan Pearson has long loved the beautiful irises bred by the artist Cedric Morris, and recommends some of the best currently available

Garden designer Dan Pearson divulges his passion for the irises bred by 20th-century artist and plantsman Cedric Morris

Ifirst encountered the Benton irises about ten years ago when visiting the iris fields of Woottens of Wenhaston in Suffolk. At the time I had just moved to Somerset and had a south-facing, free-draining slope to experiment with so, in the spirit of gettingto-know, I chose 56 of the hundreds of bearded iris that fluttered in the fields and lined them out to trial. As I whittled the numbers down over the next three years, it was the Benton irises, with their very particular colour palette and form, that repeatedly spoke to me. In the words of the man who had selected them, it was their ‘elegance, pride and delicacy’ that set them apart, but also their mutable colouring, with ‘breaks’ as delicate as the speckling on a bird’s egg, that drew me in to wanting to know more.

That man was Cedric Morris, a painter in Cornwall and Paris before founding the East Anglian School of Painting in 1937 with his partner, Arthur Lett-Haines – the young Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling were among their pupils. But Morris was also a plantsman and gardener of considerable note. He had an impeccable eye for a good plant and his artist’s eye lives on in a number of species that he spent time refining. And in recent years his range of bearded iris has seen something of a revival.

In 1935 Morris made a visit to see the work of iris breeder Angus Wilson and it was from this point on that he began his own process of selection. He made deliberate crosses from a pair of tall, bearded iris parents, growing as many as a 1,000 seedlings a year. Choosing a pair of specific parents such as ‘San Francisco’ for good edging or ‘Sacramento’ for height, he learned through a process of refinement. Noting their strengths and weaknesses, he discarded those that had bloodlines prone to rhizome rot or weak stems and honed the plicatas, a term used to describe the patterning of stitched, stippled or banded markings that contrast with the base colour of the petals.

Morris and Lett-Haines moved to Benton End in 1940, bringing with them from their previous garden at The Pound a burgeoning collection. A series of images taken in 1947-48 for Country Life show the irises grouped en masse in the lower parts of the garden, but they were later moved and grown in number around the house. This may have been because iris like new ground every ten years, but it might also reflect the plants that one imagines were closest to Cedric’s heart.

When Sarah Cook (who has supplied the captions here) left the role of head gardener at Sissinghurst Castle in 2004, she made it her mission to bring as many as possible of the collection back into cultivation. Vita Sackville-West was friends with Cedric and inevitably, there were Benton irises in the gardens at Sissinghurst. Of the 90 that were named Sarah has found 25 Morris introductions with good provenance, and five more that await further verification. She has read every

Benton End in Suffolk, where the artist and gardener Cedric Morris and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines moved in 1940, is where Morris bred many of his beautiful and painterly coloured bearded irises.

Iris ‘Benton Nutkin’ Given to me by a friend of Cedric Morris who told me it was one of Morris’s favourite irises. Standards the colour of a red squirrel, the plicata pattern on the falls is of the same colour. There is a trace of violet near the beard. 90cm. RHS H6, USDA 3a-10b†. Iris ‘Benton Daphne’ Named for Daphne Bousfield, a student at Benton End in 1939. Classic plicata markings in ‘old rose’ pink. The standards are suffused with creamy yellow, the falls are a pale cream, with old rose. 80cm. RHS H6, USDA 3a-10b.