Of the many Arts and Crafts gardens around the hills of the Cotswolds and the Malverns in England, the outdoor arrangement at Kelmscott Manor is the most tangible: a simple walled rectangle, marking a set of enclosures surrounding an Elizabethan mini manor. Rented by the designer and thinker William Morris during his lifetime (and later bought by the family), receipts show that plenty of plants and trees were put in before Morris’s daughter, May, bequeathed the property to Oxford University in the 1930s, with the stipulation that there be “no modernization.” This saved Kelmscott’s essential character— and almost destroyed it. By the time the Society of Antiquaries took over in the 1960s, the stone house (and stone roof) was resting on rotted beams and soft earth, weeks away from imploding.
A recent £6-million investment has allowed the manor to sing once more, with original Morris and Co. furniture and vibrant hand-blocked William Morris papers adorning the walls as they used to. Curious to visit before any further cash injections move the focus to the garden, we set off toward Lechlade (about two hours from London). The weather report was straight out of William Morris’s poem ‘Kelmscott Crab Apples’: “Fair was the spring but amidst his greening/ grey were the days of the hidden sun.”
Photography by Britt Willoughby Dyer for Gardenista.
“The garden is quite unaffected and very pleasant, and looks in fact as though it were a part of the house; at least the clothes of it,” wrote William Morris in 1871, adding: “which I think ought to be the aim of the layer-out of a garden.” When Morris came to the village of Kelmscott, Oxfordshire, he was a man of strong opinions on many subjects besides gardens, an eminent Victorian who rebelled against the excesses of the Victorian age. He was also frantically busy: In addition to running the home furnishings company for which he is most famous today, thanks to his time at Kelmscott, he nurtured other interests like protecting old buildings, running a printing press, embroidering, designing patterns for papers and textiles, exploring natural dyes, and writing best-selling poetry. Polymath does not even cover it: “If a chap can’t compose an epic poem while he’s weaving tapestry,” noted Morris, “he’ll never do any good at all.”
William Morris loved Kelmscott so much that he used the name for the Kelmscott Press, and renamed his rented London house, Kelmscott House. Both places were connected by the meandering river Thames. He liked the idea of traveling by river from one house to the other, which he did (just the once; it took a week) with his wife Jane and two children, Jenny and May. The willows that fringe the edges of the Thames were clearly an inspiration—the pattern Willow Boughs continues to be a best-seller—while other patterns, such as Kennet, Wandle and Lodden were named after tributaries of the Thames (and are still in production).
Morris’s housemate, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood co-founder Dante Gabriel Rossetti, initially loved Kelmscott too, especially during the first summer when Morris removed himself to Iceland. Rossetti’s decades-long affair with Morris’ wife left a strong legacy in the Pre-Raphaelite canon, with his many drawings and paintings of Jane among his best-known work. However, living alone in the cold stone house in winter, surrounded by watery flood meadows, was not so fun and Rossetti’s mental health deteriorated rapidly. He was gone after three years.
Jane Morris, one of the most recognizable of the Pre-Raphaelite “stunners,” was discovered by Morris and Rossetti at a theater in Oxford, where they were painting murals at the Oxford Union. The friends both fell for her, but Rossetti was already married (to the doomed Ophelia model Lizzie Siddal). Jane was a working-class girl from the university city whose father was a stable man and mother was a servant. When she became Mrs Morris, she was a quick study; Kelmscott villagers described her accent as “queenly.” It’s not difficult to see William Morris as a variation on Henry Higgins, with Jane Morris a precursor to Eliza Doolittle. Morris was a committed socialist like the Pygmalion playwright George Bernard Shaw, who was a longterm family friend.
