Until her death, Pat was an inspired, if unconventional, gardener. Her houses sat in a froth of flowers. Her tastes changed little with the decades and she was faithful to her early passions for fuchsias or petunias although augmented -slightly reluctantly -with more modish dahlias and zinnias. Old roses – Mme lsaac Pereire Alfred Carriere. William Lobb and Cardinal de Richelieu her palette but never far away were alarmingly healthy calendula in brightest pale orange(she had no time for varieties I shades, which were written off as over-tasteful and somehow deviant). It is no surprise then that Pat’s tea towel shelves(the Trust often offered a choice of more than 30 at one time)were rich in floral designs.
Topiary, being all green, is ideal for a limited palette and allows for the use of several shades, making for a highly decorative design with yew and box and near parterres.
From time to time the Trust has an annual focus-Enterprise Neptune, for example, was a coastline year and this cloth was made to celebrate National Trust gardens. Topiary writing was a solution Pat liked and it works well here.
There was a particular 1950s passion for Victoriana, and Pat and Peter subscribed to this true faith, whose high priests were John Betjeman, John Piper and Laurence Scarfe, publisher of the much-feted Saturday Book, a series of albums of decorative miscellanies that continued until the 1970s. It particularly favored those artifacts that were at the same time sentimental but beautifully drawn. Staffordshire figures, sailor’s valentines. Sunderland Lustreware and other decorative oddities all pleased the neo-Romantics Pats invented mug A present from The National Trust comes from the same cultural stable. Here it is stuffed with a colourful bunch of wildflowers, again appealing to that aesthetic. It was a bestseller…
Lettering is powerful. Everybody understands it and each shape is familiar. The jigsaw challenge of arranging the individual characters so that they also read as a word was one that Pat returned throughout her career. This cloth sat well alongside several others in what was her favourite palette in the late 1970s.
A decorative alphabet is a design solution that allows 26 details to be brought into play. Here they represent different facets of the work of the National Trust. Designs like this were particularly useful as they could be sold in any one of the 300 National Trust shops.
The kitchen garden summed up all that was best for Pat-a synergy of food, summer and gardening Over the years Pat had several gardens of her own, including a much-loved loan of a crumbling greenhouse belonging to adored friends and neighbors in Norfolk She would drive the three miles to their walled garden and with tiny fork, spade and rake magic up a Tuscan market full of produce.
The great joy of a wall lined with fruit trees and neat rows of crops was a weed-free and utterly pleasurable dream for Pat, as was a tidy potting shed. It fuelled many designs like this and was a recurring theme in her work. Though energetic in the garden, she never achieved such geometric accuracy.
It was a source of many regrets that in nearly 60 years of gardening Pat never grew Meconopsis poppies Californian, Iceland, orientaL. even one called Patty’s plum were her reliable subjects, but never the elusive pure blue holy grail So she made good that gap with a full-blooded drift of them in this tea towel.
Pat saw the landscape in detail and the overview was never important Here she struggled to combine a patchwork carpet of woodland-floor flowers with tree trunks. The scale issues this threw up were challenging and yet the synthesis does still work.
Pat and Peter rented a cottage in Sussex for over 20 years and had much fun filling it with Victorian furniture and ceramics bought in local junk shops. One, now long gone, in Westbourne yielded an especially rich harvest, including this large jug-in fact a pitcher-and-ewer bedroom set Decorated with faded clover leaves it stood on a staircase windowsill and was filled every year with hydrangeas throughout the autumn and winter.
The famous white garden at Sissinghurst, Kent, was one of many important gardens that were tackled in Pat’s lifetime of designing. Pat’s visual sympathies and tastes probably lay more with the gardens of Vita Sackville West’s granddaughter-in-law Sarah Raven but she knew a good thing when she saw it and much enjoyed her visit and tea with Nigel Nicolson( Vita’s son)after drawing the garden.
Back to The Cloisters in Upper Manhattan. This reconstruction of French medieval building transport across the Atlantic has been part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 1934. The extraordinary juxtaposition of eighth-century France and Fort Tyron Park next to the Hudson River was as amazing to Pat as to its millions of visitors and she was exceptionally proud of this design.
Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland is a very important part of the National Trust and is its most visited site. The tessellating hexagons, so unlikely in nature, appealed to Pat and the landmark featured in her designs more than once.
As she designed quite so many tea towels Pat was always on the lookout for a new angle. Here the seaside postcard (not the rosy bottom and hanky-covered head variety) provided a new form to work with.
Old roses had much significance for Pat. She was of the generation that rediscovered these subtle and refined variations of pinkness and rejected the slightly veg-like energy of the hybrid tea. So the Trust’s gardens at Mottisfont, Hampshire, were significant. The roses here are mixed with spires of white foxgloves.
A spare design of trees. With the exception of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ cherry tree, the world of trunk and branch and silhouetted foliage meant little to Pat, for whom they were really green cauliflowers on sticks. Nevertheless, she could turn her workmanlike hand to most subjects and here they are given the treatment.
Watersmeet in Devon was a favourite design. Pat was pleased with the white border, the woodland flower frame and the treatment of the waterfalls. Perhaps it was also a good day out, maybe with a delicious pub lunch with Ray Hallet that made this an oft-referred to tea towel.
For a building, this beefy and robust, Edwin Lutyens western masterpiece Castle Drogo, Devon, is given the smallest role to play in this design that makes more of the gardens than the house itself. The chequerboard planting makes a strong pattern at the center of the cloth, as does the bold green border.
Pat, though utterly cognisant of all nuances of good taste in home and garden and thoroughly exposed to the slightest changes in such orthodoxies, could and did break out. A recurring example of this was her undimmable passion for fuchsias. These frequently lurid pink and purple constructions always incurred a pursing of the lips from refined gardeners but to Pat, they were pure glamour.
The geranium in bold cadmium red or aniline pink, Senetti and even the African violet is greenhouse plants that had been unfashionable since 1930, but Pat held a candle for this strong gow did dra brightly colored troopers-and indeed her doorway was never without a few pots of them(she the line at hanging baskets but could probably have been persuaded.)
The terrific richness of wildflowers was a total pleasure to Pat, and with its refined and accurate illustration Rev. Keble Martins colour-coded The Concise British Flora in Colour was her bible. Many of those favourite subjects are combined in this design, which spread into countless other household products.
A tighter and richer wildflower meadow appears in one of Pat’s trademark almost invisible repeats. This was a commercial success for the National Trust for many years.
Ickworth in Suffolk is a most peculiar classical confection of the Marquesses of Bristol, and its story has been a chequered one to say the least. When drawing this Pat stayed with her former secretary Tangy Heron who, most implausibly, managed to get her mounted on quite a large horse. This was so much more extraordinary than Ickworth itself that, for her, it forever overshadowed this design.
Pat was every bit as devoted to the National Trust for Scotland as to the National Trust (and also to its commercial director Micky Blacklock who she loved). The Scottish designs number among her very best and this lush, abundant towering basket of flowers is just one such tour de force.
