Artists: Georgia O’Keefe

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Georgia Totto O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American artist. She is best known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O’Keeffe has been recognized as the “Mother of American modernism”

 

Early life and education

Georgia O’Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887 in a farmhouse located at 2405 Hwy T in the town of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Her parents, Francis Calyxtus O’Keeffe and Ida (Totto) O’Keeffe, were dairy farmers. Her father was of Irish descent. Her maternal grandfather George Victor Totto, for whom O’Keeffe was named, was a Hungarian count who came to America in 1848.

O’Keeffe was the second of seven children and the first daughter. She attended Town Hall School in Sun Prairie. By age ten she had decided to become an artist, and she and her sister received art instruction from local watercolorist Sara Mann. O’Keeffe attended high school at Sacred Heart Academy in Madison, Wisconsin as a boarder between 1901 and 1902. In late 1902, the O’Keeffes moved from Wisconsin to the close-knit neighborhood of Peacock Hill in Williamsburg, Virginia. O’Keeffe stayed in Wisconsin with her aunt and attended Madison High School, then joined her family in Virginia in 1903. She completed high school as a boarder at Chatham Episcopal Institute in Virginia (now Chatham Hall) and graduated in 1905. She was a member of the Kappa Delta sorority.

O’Keeffe studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1905 to 1906. In 1907, she attended the Art Students League in New York City, where she studied under William Merritt Chase. In 1908, she won the League’s William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot. Her prize was a scholarship to attend the League’s outdoor summer school in Lake George, New York. While in the city in 1908, O’Keeffe attended an exhibition of Rodin’s watercolors at the gallery 291, owned by her future husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

O’Keeffe abandoned the idea of pursuing a career as an artist in late 1908, claiming that she could never distinguish herself as an artist within the mimetic tradition which had formed the basis of her art training.[7] She took a job in Chicago as a commercial artist. She did not paint for four years, and said that the smell of turpentine made her sick. She was inspired to paint again in 1912, when she attended a class at the University of Virginia Summer School, where she was introduced to the innovative ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow by Alon Bement. Dow encouraged artists to express themselves using line, color, and shading harmoniously. From 1912-14, she taught art in the public schools in Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle. She attended Teachers College of Columbia University from 1914–15, where she took classes from Dow, who greatly influenced O’Keeffe’s thinking about the process of making art.[7] She served as a teaching assistant to Bement during the summers from 1913–16 and taught at Columbia College, Columbia, South Carolina in late 1915, where she completed a series of highly innovative charcoal abstractions. After further course work at Columbia in early 1916 and summer teaching for Bement, she took a job as head of the art department at West Texas State Normal College from late 1916 to February 1918, the fledgling West Texas A&M University in Canyon just south of Amarillo. While there, she often visited the Palo Duro Canyon, making its forms a subject in her work.

Career

New York

O’Keeffe had made some charcoal drawings in late 1915 which she had mailed from South Carolina to Anita Pollitzer. Pollitzer took them to Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 gallery early in 1916. Stieglitz told Pollitzer that the drawings were the “purest, finest, sincerest things that had entered 291 in a long while”, and that he would like to show them. O’Keeffe had first visited 291 in 1908, but did not speak with Stieglitz then, although she came to have high regard for him and to know him in early 1916, when she was in New York at Teachers College. In April 1916, he exhibited ten of her drawings at 291. O’Keeffe knew that Stieglitz was planning to exhibit her work but he had not told her when, and she was surprised to learn that her work was on view; she confronted Stieglitz over the drawings but agreed to let them remain on exhibit. Stieglitz organized O’Keeffe’s first solo show at 291 in April 1917, which included oil paintings and watercolors completed in Texas.

Stieglitz and O’Keeffe corresponded frequently beginning in 1916 and, in June 1918, she accepted his invitation to move to New York to devote all of her time to her work. The two were deeply in love and, shortly after her arrival, they began living together, even though Stieglitz was married and 23 years her senior. That year, Stieglitz first took O’Keeffe to his family home at the village of Lake George in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, and they spent part of every year there until 1929, when O’Keeffe spent the first of many summers painting in New Mexico. In 1924, Stieglitz’s divorce was approved by a judge and, within four months, he and O’Keeffe married. It was a small, private ceremony at John Marin’s house, and afterward the couple went back home. There was no reception, festivities, or honeymoon. O’Keeffe said later that they married in order to help soothe the troubles of Stieglitz’s daughter Kitty who was being treated in a sanatorium for depression and hallucinations at that time. The marriage did not seem to have any immediate effect on either Stieglitz or O’Keeffe; they both continued working on their individual projects as they had before. For the rest of their lives together, their relationship was, as biographer Benita Eisler characterized it,

a collusion … a system of deals and trade-offs, tacitly agreed to and carried out, for the most part, without the exchange of a word. Preferring avoidance to confrontation on most issues, O’Keeffe was the principal agent of collusion in their union.

Stieglitz started photographing O’Keeffe when she visited him in New York City to see her 1917 exhibition. By 1937, when he retired from photography, he had made more than 350 portraits of her. Most of the more erotic photographs were made in the 1910s and early 1920s. In February 1921, forty-five of Stieglitz’s photographs were exhibited in a retrospective exhibition at the Anderson Galleries, including many of O’Keeffe, some of which depicted her in the nude. It created a public sensation. She once made a remark to Pollitzer about the nude photographs which may be the best indication of O’Keeffe’s ultimate reaction to being their subject: “I felt somehow that the photographs had nothing to do with me personally.” In 1978, she wrote about how distant from them she had become: “When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me-some of them more than sixty years ago—I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives. If the person in the photographs were living in this world today, she would be quite a different person—but it doesn’t matter—Stieglitz photographed her then.”

Beginning in 1918, O’Keeffe came to know the many early American modernists who were part of Stieglitz’s circle of artists, including Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Paul Strand, and Edward Steichen. Strand’s photography, as well as that of Stieglitz and his many photographer friends, inspired O’Keeffe’s work. Also around this time, O’Keeffe became sick during the 1918 flu pandemic, like so many others. Soon after 1918, she began working primarily in oil, a shift away from having worked primarily in watercolor in the earlier 1910s. By the mid-1920s, O’Keeffe began making large-scale paintings of natural forms at close range, as if seen through a magnifying lens. In 1924, she painted her first large-scale flower painting Petunia, No. 2, which was first exhibited in 1925. She also completed a significant body of paintings of New York buildings, such as City Night and New York—Night (1926) and Radiator Bldg—Night, New York (1927).

O’Keeffe turned to working more representationally in the 1920s in an effort to move her critics away from Freudian interpretations. Her earlier work had been mostly abstract, but works such as Black Iris III (1926) evoke a veiled representation of female genitalia while also accurately depicting the center of an iris. O’Keeffe consistently denied the validity of Freudian interpretations of her art, but fifty years after it had first been interpreted in that way, many prominent feminist artists assessed her work similarly; Judy Chicago, for example, gave O’Keeffe a prominent place in her The Dinner Party. Although 1970s feminists celebrated O’Keeffe as the originator of “female iconography”, O’Keeffe rejected their celebration of her work and refused to cooperate with any of their projects.

In 1922, the New York Sun published an article quoting O’Keeffe: “It is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.” Inspired by Precisionism, The Green Apple, completed in 1922, depicts her notion of simple, meaningful life.

Beginning in 1923, Stieglitz organized annual exhibitions of O’Keeffe’s work. By the mid-1920s, O’Keeffe had become known as one of the most important American artists. Her work commanded high prices; in 1928, Stieglitz masterminded a sale of six of her calla lily paintings for US$25,000, which would have been the largest sum ever paid for a group of paintings by a living American artist. Although the sale fell through, Stieglitz’s promotion of it drew extensive media attention.

Hawaii

In 1938, the advertising agency N. W. Ayer & Son approached O’Keeffe about creating two paintings for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now Dole Food Company) to use in their advertising. Other artists who produced paintings of Hawaii for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company’s advertising include Lloyd Sexton, Jr., Millard Sheets, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Isamu Noguchi, and Miguel Covarrubias. The offer came at a critical time in O’Keeffe’s life: she was 51, and her career seemed to be stalling (critics were calling her focus on New Mexico limited, and branding her desert images “a kind of mass production”). She arrived in Honolulu February 8, 1939 aboard the SS Lurline, and spent nine weeks in Oahu, Maui, Kauai, and the island of Hawaii. By far the most productive and vivid period was on Maui, where she was given complete freedom to explore and paint. She painted flowers, landscapes, and traditional Hawaiian fishhooks. Back in New York, O’Keeffe completed a series of 20 sensual, verdant paintings. However, she did not paint the requested pineapple until the Hawaiian Pineapple Company sent a plant to her New York studio.

New Mexico

By 1929, O’Keeffe acted on her increasing need to find a new source of inspiration for her work and to escape summers at Lake George, where she was surrounded by the Stieglitz family and their friends. O’Keeffe had considered finding a studio separate from Lake George in upstate New York and had also thought about spending the summer in Europe, but opted instead to travel to Santa Fe, with her friend Rebecca Strand. The two set out by train in May 1929 and soon after their arrival, Mabel Dodge Luhan moved them to her house in Taos and provided them with studios. O’Keeffe went on many pack trips exploring the rugged mountains and deserts of the region that summer and later visited the nearby D. H. Lawrence Ranch, where she completed her now famous oil painting, The Lawrence Tree, currently owned by the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut.

While in Taos in 1929, O’Keeffe visited and painted the nearby historical San Francisco de Asis Mission Church at Ranchos de Taos. She made several paintings of the church, as had many artists, and her painting of a fragment of it silhouetted against the sky captured it in a different way.

Between 1929 and 1949, O’Keeffe spent part of nearly every year working in New Mexico. She collected rocks and bones from the desert floor and made them and the distinctive architectural and landscape forms of the area subjects in her work. She also went on several camping trips with friends, visiting important sites in the Southwest, and in 1961, she and others, including photographers Eliot Porter and Todd Webb, went on a rafting trip down the Colorado River about Glen Canyon, Utah.

Late in 1932, O’Keeffe suffered a nervous breakdown that was brought on, in part, because she was unable to complete a Radio City Music Hall mural project that had fallen behind schedule. She was hospitalized in early 1933 and did not paint again until January 1934. In early 1933 and 1934, O’Keeffe recuperated in Bermuda, and she returned to New Mexico in mid-1934. In August of that year, she visited Ghost Ranch, north of Abiquiú, for the first time and decided immediately to live there; in 1940, she moved into a house on the ranch property. The varicolored cliffs of Ghost Ranch inspired some of her most famous landscapes. In 1977, O’Keeffe wrote: “[the] cliffs over there are almost painted for you—you think—until you try to paint them.” Among guests to visit her at the ranch over the years were Charles and Anne Lindbergh, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, poet Allen Ginsberg, and photographer Ansel Adams.

Known as a loner, O’Keeffe explored the land she loved often in her Ford Model A, which she purchased and learned to drive in 1929. She often talked about her fondness for Ghost Ranch and Northern New Mexico, as in 1943, when she explained: “Such a beautiful, untouched lonely feeling place, such a fine part of what I call the ‘Faraway’. It is a place I have painted before … even now I must do it again.”

In the 1930s and 1940s, O’Keeffe’s reputation and popularity continued to grow, earning her numerous commissions. Her work was included in exhibitions in and around New York. She completed Summer Days, a painting featuring a deer’s skull adorned with various wildflowers, against a desert background in 1936, and it became one of her most famous and well-known works. During the 1940s O’Keeffe had two one-woman retrospectives, the first at the Art Institute of Chicago (1943), and the second in 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Manhattan, the first retrospective MoMA held for a woman artist. O’Keeffe enjoyed many accolades and honorary degrees from numerous universities. In the mid-1940s, the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan sponsored a project to establish the first catalogue of her work.

As early as 1936, O’Keeffe developed an intense interest in what is called the “Black Place”, which was about 150 miles west of her Ghost Ranch house, and she made an extensive series of paintings of this site in the 1940s. She traveled and camped there often with her friend, Maria Chabot, and in 1945 with Eliot Porter as well as in subsequent years,1959, and 1977. O’Keeffe said that the Black Place resembled “a mile of elephants with gray hills and white sand at their feet.” At times the wind was so strong when she was painting there that she had trouble keeping her canvas on the easel. When the heat from the sun became intense, she crawled under her car for shade. The Black Place still remains remote and uninhabited.

She also made paintings of the “White Place”, a white rock formation located near her Abiquiú house. In 1945, O’Keeffe bought a second house, an abandoned hacienda in Abiquiú, some 18 miles (26 km) south of Ghost Ranch. The Abiquiú house was renovated through 1949 by Chabot.

Shortly after O’Keeffe arrived for the summer in New Mexico in 1946, Stieglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis. She immediately flew to New York to be with him. He died on July 13, 1946. She buried his ashes at Lake George. She spent the next three years mostly in New York settling his estate, and moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949. From 1946 through the 1950s, she made the architectural forms of her Abiquiú house—patio wall and door—subjects in her work. Another distinctive painting of the decade was Ladder to the Moon, 1958. From her first world travels in the late 1950s, O’Keeffe produced an extensive series of paintings of clouds, such as Above the Clouds I, 1962/1963. These were inspired by her views from the windows of airplanes. Below is an external link to a color image of one of these aerial cloudscape canvases.

O’Keeffe met photographer Todd Webb in the 1940s, and after his move to New Mexico in 1961, he often made photographs of her, as did numerous other important American photographers, who consistently presented O’Keeffe as a “loner, a severe figure and self-made person.” While O’Keeffe was known to have a “prickly personality”, Webb’s photographs portray her with a kind of “quietness and calm” suggesting a relaxed friendship, and revealing new contours of O’Keeffe’s character.

In late 1970, the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted the Georgia O’Keeffe Retrospective Exhibition, the first retrospective exhibition of her work in New York since 1946, the year Stieglitz died. This exhibit did much to revive her public career.

Later years and death

In 1972, O’Keeffe’s eyesight was compromised by macular degeneration, leading to the loss of central vision and leaving her with only peripheral vision. She stopped oil painting without assistance in 1972, but continued working in pencil and charcoal until 1984. Juan Hamilton, a young potter, appeared at her ranch house in 1973 looking for work. She hired him for a few odd jobs and soon employed him full-time. He became her closest confidant, companion, and business manager until her death. Hamilton taught O’Keeffe to work with clay and, working with assistance, she produced clay pots and a series of works in watercolor. In 1976, she wrote a book about her art and allowed a film to be made about her in 1977.

O’Keeffe became increasingly frail in her late 90s. She moved to Santa Fe in 1984, where she died on March 6, 1986 at the age of 98. In accordance with her wishes, her body was cremated and her ashes were scattered to the wind at the top of Pedernal Mountain, over her beloved “faraway”.

Awards

In 1962, O’Keeffe was elected to the fifty-member American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1966, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1977, President Gerald R. Ford presented O’Keeffe with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor awarded to American civilians. In 1985, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Legacy

Following O’Keeffe’s death, her family contested her will because codicils made to it in the 1980s had left all of her estate to Hamilton. The case was ultimately settled out of court in July 1987. The case became famous as a precedent in estate planning. A substantial part of her estate’s assets were transferred to the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, which dissolved in 2006, leaving these assets to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, established in Santa Fe in 1995 to perpetuate O’Keeffe’s artistic legacy. These assets included a large body of her work, photographs, archival materials, and her Abiquiú house, library, and property. The Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio in Abiquiú was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1998 and is now owned by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

In 1991, the PBS aired the American Playhouse production A Marriage: Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, starring Jane Alexander as O’Keeffe and Christopher Plummer as Alfred Stieglitz.

In 1996, the U.S. Postal Service issued a 32 cent stamp honoring O’Keeffe. In 2013, on the 100th anniversary of the Armory Show, the USPS issued a stamp featuring O’Keeffe’s Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico/Out Back of Marie’s II, 1930 as part of their Modern Art in America series.

In 2006, a fossilized species of archosaur was named after O’Keeffe. Blocks originally quarried in 1947 and 1948 near O’Keeffe’s home at Ghost Ranch were opened fifty years after being collected. The fossil strongly resembles ornithomimid dinosaurs, but are actually more closely related to crocodiles. The specimen was named Effigia okeeffeae (“O’Keeffe’s Ghost”) in January 2006, “in honor of Georgia O’Keeffe for her numerous paintings of the badlands at Ghost Ranch and her interest in the Coelophysis Quarry when it was discovered”.

Lifetime Television produced a biopic of Georgia O’Keeffe starring Joan Allen as O’Keeffe, Jeremy Irons as Alfred Stieglitz, Henry Simmons as Jean Toomer, Ed Begley, Jr. as Stieglitz’s brother Lee, and Tyne Daly as Mabel Dodge Luhan. It premiered on September 19, 2009.

On 20 November 2014, O’Keeffe’s 1932 painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 sold for $44,405,000, more than three times the previous world auction record for any female artist.

RHS Hampton Court Designers 2015 : Ann – Marie Powell

Designed by
Ann-Marie Powell Gardens
Built by
The Outdoor Room
Sponsored by
Macmillan Cancer Support
The Macmillan Legacy Garden offers a contemporary interpretation of an edge-of-woodland space. The planting is calm, soft and inviting around a large pod-like structure that offers a relaxing space to sit, and from where one can look over the garden and contemplate life’s journey. This is a calm outdoor space with a tranquil atmosphere where small groups or individuals can enjoy a quiet conversation or solitary contemplation.

The garden is created to encourage people to consider leaving a legacy or gift in their will to support the work of Macmillan Cancer Support. It is designed as a community space and one that could be attached to a Macmillan Care Centre. The green and white of the planting represents the primary colours of Macmillan’s brand. Ferns are plentiful with highlights of white herbaceous planting that includes the ‘Macmillan Nurse’ rose, which enjoys semi-shade.

India : The Red Fort Delhi, A Bucket List Must …

The Red Fort was the residence of the Mughal emperor of India for nearly 200 years, until 1857. It is located in the centre of Delhi and houses a number of museums. In addition to accommodating the emperors and their households, it was the ceremonial and political centre of Mughal government and the setting for events critically impacting the region.

The Red Fort, constructed by Shah Jahan, was built as the fortified palace of Shahjahanabad, capital of the fifth Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, in 1648. Named for its massive enclosing walls of red sandstone, it is adjacent to the older Salimgarh Fort, built by Islam Shah Suri in 1546. The imperial apartments consist of a row of pavilions, connected by a water channel known as the Stream of Paradise (Nahr-i-Behisht). The Red Fort is considered to represent the zenith of Mughal creativity under Shah Jahan. Although the palace was planned according to Islamic prototypes, each pavilion contains architectural elements typical of Mughal buildings, reflecting a fusion of Timurid, Persian and Hindu traditions. The Red Fort’s innovative architectural style, including its garden design, influenced later buildings and gardens in Delhi, Rajasthan, Punjab, Kashmir, Braj, Rohilkhand and elsewhere. With the Salimgarh Fort, it was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007 as part of the Red Fort Complex.

The Red Fort is an iconic symbol of India. On the Independence Day of India (15 August), the Prime Minister of India hoists the national flag at the main gate of the fort and delivers a nationally-broadcast speech from its ramparts.

Hidden India : The Toy Train Form Kalka To Shimla …… Step Back In Time

The Kalka–Shimla Railway is a 2 ft 6 in (762 mm) narrow gauge railway in North-West India travelling along a mostly mountainous route from Kalka to Shimla. It is known for dramatic views of the hills and surrounding villages.

History

Shimla (then spelt Simla) was settled by the British shortly after the first Anglo-Gurkha war, and is located at 7,116 feet (2,169 m) in the foothills of the Himalayas. By the 1830s, Shimla had already developed as a major base for the British. It became the summer capital of British India in 1864, and was also the headquarters of the British army in India. Prior to construction of the railway, communication with the outside world was via village cart.

The 1,676 mm (5 ft 6 in) broad gauge Delhi-Kalka line opened in 1891. The Kalka–Shimla Railway was build on 2 ft (610 mm) narrow gauge tracks by the Delhi-Ambala-Kalka Railway Company beginning in 1898. The estimated cost was Rs 86,78,500 but the cost doubled during construction.The 96.54 km (59.99 mi) line opened for traffic on November 9, 1903. It was inaugurated by Viceroy of India Lord Curzon. Because of the high capital and maintenance costs and peculiar working conditions, the Kalka–Shimla Railway was allowed to charge higher fares than on other lines. However, the company was still not profitable and was purchased by the government on January 1, 1906 for Rs 1,71,07,748. In 1905 the line was regauged to 2 ft 6 in (762 mm) to conform to standards set by the Indian War Department.This route passes through a city named Solan, which is also known as mini Shimla. A festival celebrating the goddess Shoolini Devi, after which the city is named, is held each summer in June.

In 2007, the government of Himachal Pradesh declared the railway a heritage property. For about a week starting on September 11, 2007, an expert team from UNESCO visited the railway to review and inspect it for possible selection as a World Heritage Site. On July 8, 2008, the Kalka–Shimla Railway became part of the World Heritage Site Mountain Railways of India. alongside Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, Nilgiri Mountain Railway, and Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus.

Route

The Kalka–Shimla Railway was built to connect Shimla, the summer capital of India during the British Raj, with the Indian rail system. Now, Shimla is the capital city of Himachal Pradesh and Kalka is a town in the Panchkula district of Haryana. The route is famous for its scenery and improbable construction.

Stations

The route winds from the Himalayan Sivalik foothills at Kalka to several important points such as Dharampur, Solan, Kandaghat, Taradevi, Barog, Salogra, Totu (Jutogh), Summerhill and Shimla at an altitude of 2,076 meters (6,811 ft).

Tunnels

Originally 107 tunnels were built on Kalka Shimla Railway Track and 102 remain in use. The longest tunnel is at Barog. Engineer Colonel Barog dug the tunnel from both ends and could not align them and was symbolically fined one rupee. He couldn’t live with the shame and committed suicide inside the incomplete tunnel. Chief Engineer H.S. Herlington later completed the tunnel with help from Bhalku, a local sadhu.

Infrastructure

The line has 864 bridges. The railway has a ruling gradient of 1 in 33 or 3%. It has 919 curves, the sharpest being 48 degrees (a radius of 37.47 m or 122.93 feet). Climbing from 656 meters (2,152 ft), the line terminates at an elevation of 2,076 meters (6,811 ft) at Shimla. The line originally used 42 lb/yd (21 kg/m) rail but this was later relaid to 60 lb/yd (30 kg/m) rail.

Locomotives

The first locomotives to arrive were two class “B” 0-4-0ST from the famous Darjeeling Himalayan Railway. These were built as 2 ft (610 mm) gauge engines, but were converted to 2 ft 6 in (762 mm) gauge in 1901. They were not large enough for the job, and were sold in 1908. They were followed by 10 engines with a 0-4-2T wheel arrangement of a slightly larger design, introduced in 1902. These locomotives weighed 21.5 tons (21.85 tonnes) each, and had 30″ (762 mm) driving wheels, and 12″x16″ (304.8 mm x 406.4 mm) cylinders. They were later classified into the “B” class by the North Western State Railways. All these locomotives were constructed by the British firm of Sharp, Stewart and Company.

Larger locomotives were introduced in the form of a 2-6-2T, of which 30 were built with slight variations between 1904 and 1910. Built by the Hunslet and the North British Locomotive Company, these locomotives were about 35 tons (35.56 tonnes), with 30″ (762 mm) drivers and 14″x16″ (355.6 mm x 406.4 mm) cylinders. These locomotives, later classed K and K2 by the North Western State Railways, subsequently handled the bulk of the railways traffic during the steam era. A pair of Kitson-Meyer 2-6-2+2-6-2 articulated locomotives, classed TD, were supplied in 1928. They quickly fell into disfavour, as it often took all day for enough freight to be assembled to justify operating a goods train hauled by one of these locomotives. Shippers looking for a faster service started to turn to road transport. These 68 ton (69.09 tonnes) locomotives were soon transferred to the Kangra Valley Railway, and subsequently ended up converted to 1,000 mm (3 ft 3³⁄₈ in) metre gauge in Pakistan.

Steam operation of regular trains ended 1971.

The first diesel locomotives on the Kalka–Shimla Railway, class ZDM-1 by Arnold Jung Lokomotivfabrik (articulated with two prime movers), started operation in 1955. In the 1970s they were regauged and reclassified as NDM-1, then used on the Matheran Hill Railway.

In the 1960s, class ZDM-2 built by Maschinenbau Kiel (MaK) was introduced. These locomotives were later transferred to other lines.

Today this line is operated with class ZDM-3 diesel-hydraulic locomotives (522 kW, 50 km/h), built 1970 to 1982 by Chittaranjan Locomotive Works with a single cab road switcher body. Six locomotives of the same class were built in 2008/2009 by Central Railway Loco Workshop Parel with updated components and a dual cab body providing better visibility of the track.

Rolling stock

The railway opened using conventional four-wheel and bogie coaches. The tare weight of these coaches meant that only four of the bogie coaches could be hauled upgrade by the 2-6-2T locomotives. In an effort to increase loadings in 1908 the entire coaching stock was rebuilt as bogie coaches 33′ long by 7′ wide, using steel frames and bodies. To further save weight the roofs were constructed using aluminium. Savings in weight meant the locomotives could now haul six of the larger coaches, significantly expanding capacity. This was an early example of the use of steel in construction of coaches to reduce the coaches’ tare.

Goods rolling stock was constructed on a common pressed steel underframe, 30′ long and 7′ wide. Both open and covered wagons were provided, the open wagons having a capacity of 19 tons and the covered wagons 17.5 tons.

Trains.

• 52451/52452 Shivalik Deluxe Express (KLK 5:30 – 10:15 SML 17:40 – 22:25 KLK) with more comfortable chair cars and meal service
• 52453/52454 Kalka Shimla Express (KLK 6:00 – 11:05 SML 18:15 – 23:20 KLK) with first, second class and unreserved seating
• 52455/52456 Himalayan Queen (KLK 12:10 – 17:20 SML 10:30 – 16:10 KLK) with chair cars, connecting in Kalka to the Mail/Express train of the same name and the Kalka Shatabdi from/to Delhi
• 52457/52458 Kalka Shimla Passenger (KLK 4:00 – 9:20 SML 14:25 – 20:10 KLK) with first, second class and unreserved seating
• 72451/72452 Rail Motor (KLK 5:10 – 9:50 SML 16:25 – 21:35 KLK), a railbus originally used to transport upper class travellers, first class seating only, glass roof and possibility to look out to the front
• Shivalik Queen: This luxury coach can be booked by couples or groups up to eight people through IRCTC Chandigarh office and attached to regular trains. It has four elegantly furnished coupés with two toilets, wall to wall carpets and big windows. The journey costs 4200 INR for four couples including lunch.

Television film

The BBC made a series of three documentaries about Indian Hill Railways. The Kalka–Shimla Railway was the subject of the third program.

The Kalka-Shimla railway was also featured in the Punjab episode of CNN’s Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.

People : Ernest Henry ‘Chinese’ Wilson, Plant Collector And Pupil Of Veitch …..

Ernest Henry “Chinese” Wilson (15 February 1876 – 15 October 1930), better known as E. H. Wilson, was a notable English plant collector who introduced a large range of about 2000 of Asian plant species to the West; some sixty bear his name.

Career

Wilson was born in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire but the family soon moved to Shirley, Warwickshire, where they set up a floristry business. He left school early for employment at the local nursery of Messrs. Hewitt, Warwickshire, as apprentice gardener, and, aged 16, at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens; there he also studied at Birmingham Technical School in the evenings, receiving the Queen’s Prize for botany. In 1897 he began work at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where he won the Hooker Prize for an essay on conifers. He then accepted a position as Chinese plant collector with the firm of James Veitch & Sons, who were eager above all to retrieve the dove tree, Davidia involucrata. “Stick to the one thing you are after,” advised Harry Veitch, who had more than a dozen plant hunters on payroll, “and don’t spend time and money wandering about. Probably every worthwhile plant in China has now been introduced to Europe.”

After six months at Veitch’s Coombe Woods Nursery, Wilson travelled west towards China, stopping for five days at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, Massachusetts, where he carried a letter of introduction to Charles Sprague Sargent and studied techniques for shipping seeds and plants without damage. He continued across the U.S. by train, and sailed from San Francisco, reaching Hong Kong on 3 June 1899. Sargent had suggested he head straight to Sze-mao to talk to Augustine Henry, who had seen a unique dove tree twelve years previously. Though the tree had been recently cut down when Wilson reached it, he rediscovered the specimens noticed by Père David 600 km away in Ichang, Hubei. Wilson collected for two years in Hubei Province, reaching isolated mountain valleys with an intrepid spirit that has made him legendary, before returning to England in April 1902 with seed of 305 species, and 35 Wardian cases of bulbs, corms, rhizomes, and tubers, many of which Veitch introduced into Western commerce, as well as dried herbarium specimens, representing some 906 plant species.

On his first return Wilson married Helen Ganderton, of Edgbaston, but within six months Veitch sent him out again, this time with the yellow Chinese poppy, Meconopsis integrifolia as his objective. In 1903 Wilson discovered the Regal lily in west Szechuan along the Min River. He revisited the site in 1908 and collected more bulbs, but most of these rotted while en route back to the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. In 1910 he again returned to the Min valley, but this time his leg was crushed during an avalanche of boulders as he was carried along the trail in his sedan chair. After setting his leg with the tripod of his camera, he was carried back to civilization on a three-day forced march. Thereafter he walked with what he called his “lily limp”. It was this third shipment of bulbs that successfully introduced the Regal Lily into cultivation in the United States.

A few of the many plants introduced to western cultivation from his first expedition include Acer griseum, Actinidia deliciosa (kiwi fruit), Berberis julianae, Clematis armandii, Clematis montana var. rubens, Davidia involucrata, Ilex pernyi, Jasminum mesnyi, and Primula pulverulenta. Many of the species he collected were formally named by Maxwell T. Masters. In his reminiscence If I were to Make a Garden, Wilson claimed to have introduced 25 species of wild rose to the West. One of them, Rosa willmottiae was named after Ellen Willmott a famous, important sponsor, expert and writer of “The Genus Rosa”. Early in the 20th century Henry Morris Upcher, owner of Sheringham Park, Norfolk, England obtained Rhododendron seeds of various types from Wilson. Plants from this source which can found at the garden include Rhododendron ambiguum, R. calophytum and R. decorum, among others.In subsequent years he became a collector for Sargent at the Arnold Arboretum, and made further expeditions to China in 1907, 1908, and 1910, as well as to Japan (1911-1916), where he collected 63 named forms of cherry blossom. One of his footprints in Japan is Wilson’s introduction of the gigantic “Yaku sugi stump” called Wilson stump (ウィルソン株 Wilson kabu^?) in Yakushima to Western readers in 1914. His hypothesis made in 1916, that the Japanese cherry Prunus × yedoensis was a hybrid, was supported by hybridisation experiments in Japanese national laboratories in 1965.

He returned to Asia in 1917-1918, exploring in Korea and Formosa. Upon return to the Arnold Arboretum in 1919 he was appointed Associate Director. Three years later he set off for a two-year expedition through Australia, New Zealand, India, Central and South America, and East Africa. In 1927 he became Keeper of the Arnold Arboretum.

Wilson and his wife died in Worcester, Massachusetts, on 15 October 1930 in an automobile accident.

Honours

In recognition of his service to horticulture he received many awards such as the Victoria Medal of Honour of the Royal Horticultural Society of London in 1912, the Veitch Memorial Medal, and the George Robert White Memorial Medal of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received an honorary M.A. degree from Harvard University and the D. Sc. degree from Trinity College (Connecticut).

Over 100 plants introduced by Wilson have received the First-Class Certificate or Awards of Merit of the Royal Horticultural Society of London. Sixty species and varieties of Chinese plants bear his name. In 1916-1917 Charles Sprague Sargent edited a partial list of his introductions as Plantae Wilsonianae.

The Ernest Wilson Memorial Garden is in the village of Chipping Campden.

In May 2010, a blue plaque was erected at Birmingham Botanical Gardens, by the Birmingham Civic Society, marking Wilson’s time there.

Selected works

•   1912 – Vegetation in western China : a series of 500 photographs with index

•   1913 – Naturalist in western China, with vasculum, camera, and gun; being some account of eleven years’ travel, exploration, and observation in the more remote parts of the Flowery Kingdom

•   1916 – Conifers and taxads of Japan

•   1916 – History and botanical relationships of the modern rose, compiled by Ernest H. Wilson and Fred A. Wilson

•   1917 – Plantae Wilsonianae; an enumeration of the woody plants collected in western China for the Arnold arboretum of Harvard university during the years 1907, 1908, and 1910, by E. H. Wilson, ed. by Charles Sprague Sargent

•   1917 – Aristocrats of the garden

•   1920 – Romance of our trees

•   1921 – Monograph of azaleas : Rhododendron subgenus Anthodendron, by Ernest Henry Wilson and Alfred Rehder

•   1925 – America’s greatest garden; the Arnold Arboretum

•   1925 – Lilies of eastern Asia; a monograph

•   1927 – Plant hunting

•   1928 – More aristocrats of the garden

•   1929 – China, mother of gardens

•   1930 – Aristocrats of the trees

•   1931 – If I Were to Make a Garden

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The New York Botanical Garden, Where Viagra Helps The Plants !!!!!

 

The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) is a designated national landmark botanical garden located in the Bronx, New York City. It spans some 250 acres (100 ha) of Bronx Park and is home to the Pfizer Plant Research Laboratory. The facility offers exhibitions and flower shows throughout the year and is visited by over 900,000 visitors annually.

Mission statement

The New York Botanical Garden is an advocate for the plant kingdom. The Garden pursues its mission through its role as a museum of living plant collections arranged in gardens and landscapes across its National Historic Landmark site; through its comprehensive education programs in horticulture and plant science; and through the wide-ranging research programs of the International Plant Science Center.

History

The Lorillard family owned most of the land that later became the New York Botanical Garden. That land and adjacent acreage was acquired by the City of New York and set aside for the creation of a zoo and botanical garden. The Garden was established on 28 April 1891 on part of the grounds of the Lorillard Estate (formerly owned by the tobacco magnate Pierre Lorillard) and a parcel that was formerly the easternmost portion of the campus of St. John’s College (now Fordham University). The Garden’s creation followed a fund-raising campaign led by the Torrey Botanical Club and Columbia University botanist Nathaniel Lord Britton and his wife Elizabeth Gertrude Britton who were inspired to emulate the Royal Botanic Gardens in London. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1967.

Grounds

The Garden contains 50 different gardens and plant collections. Sightseers can easily spend a day admiring the serene cascade waterfall, wetlands and a 50-acre (20 ha) tract of original, old-growth New York forest, never logged, containing oaks, American beeches, cherry, birch, tulip and white ash trees—some more than two centuries old.

Garden highlights include an 1890s-vintage, wrought-iron framed, “crystal-palace style” greenhouse by Lord & Burnham, now Haupt Conservatory; the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden (originally laid out by Beatrix Jones Farrand in 1916); a rock garden; a 37-acre (15 ha) conifer collection; extensive research facilities including a propagation center, 550,000-volume library, and an herbarium of over seven million botanical specimens dating back more than three centuries.

At the heart of the Garden are 50 acres (20 ha) of old-growth forest, the largest existing remnant of the original forest which covered all of New York City before the arrival of European settlers in the 17th century. The forest itself is split by the Bronx River, the only fresh water river in New York City, and this stretch of the river includes a riverine canyon and rapids. Along the shores sits the landmark Stone Mill, previously known as the Lorillard Snuff Mill built in 1840. Sculptor Charles Tefft created the Fountain of Life on the grounds in 1905. “It was conceived in the spirit of Italian baroque fountains, with the surging movement of galloping horses and muscular riders.”

Research laboratories

The Pfizer Plant Research Laboratory, built with funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, New York State and New York City, and named for its largest private donor, is a major new research institution at the Garden that opened in 2006. The laboratory is a pure research institution, with projects more diverse than research in universities and pharmaceutical companies.

The laboratory’s research emphasis is on plant genomics, the study of how genes function in plant development. One question scientists hope to answer is Darwin’s “abominable mystery”; when, where, and why flowering plants emerged. The laboratory’s research also furthers the discipline of molecular systematics, the study of DNA as evidence that can reveal the evolutionary history and relationships of plant species. Staff scientists also study plant use in immigrant communities in New York City and the genetic mechanisms by which neurotoxins are produced in some plants, work that may be related to nerve disease in humans.

A staff of 200 trains 42 doctoral students at a time, from all over the world. Since the 1890s, scientists from The New York Botanical Garden have mounted about 2,000 exploratory missions worldwide to collect plants in the wild.

At the Pfizer Plant Research Laboratory, genomic DNA from many different species of plants is extracted to create a library of the DNA of the world’s plants. This collection is stored in a 768-square-foot (71.3 m²) DNA storage room with 20 freezers housing millions of specimens, including rare, endangered or extinct species. To protect the collection during winter power outages, there is a backup 300-kilowatt electric generator.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has granted the NYBG $572,000 to begin a project called TreeBOL, the Tree Barcode of Life. By sampling the DNA from all 100,000 different species of trees from around the world over the next few years, TreeBOL will document the diversity of plant life, and advance the process of plant DNA barcoding.

LuEsther T. Mertz Library

When, in 1881, land was set aside by the New York State Legislature for the creation of “a public botanic garden of the highest class” for the City of New York, the Library and Conservatory were the first two structures built on the grounds. Prominent civic leaders and financiers, including Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and J. P. Morgan, agreed to match the City’s commitment to finance the buildings and improvements.

Founded in 1899, the LuEsther T. Mertz Library is considered to be the largest, most comprehensive botanical library in the Americas. In addition to botany, horticulture, the Library’s collections are used for studies in fields as diverse as history, anthropology, landscape and building design, architectural history, ethnobotany, economic botany, urban social history, and environmental policy. In addition to current scholarly books and serials, the Mertz Library holds many rare, and historically important works ranging from medieval herbals, to 17th-century depictions of the princely gardens of Europe, to accounts of botanical exploration and discovery in the 18th century, to the writings of Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) and Charles Darwin.

The Library has been led by a series of accomplished individuals during its over 100 year history. Their names and dates of service are as follows:

• T. MacDougal (acting librarian, 1899)
• Anna Murray Vail (January 1900 – September 1907)
• John Hendley Barnhart (October 1907 – December 1912)
• Sarah Harlow (January 1913 – October 1937)
• Elizabeth C. Hall (November 1937 – 1960)
• James J. Daly, Administrative Librarian (1960–1961)
• Robert Jones, Administrative Librarian, 1962
• Mulford Martin, Acting Senior Curator of the Library (1964–1965)
• John F. Reed, Curator of the Library (1965–1971)
• Charles R. Long, Administrative Librarian (1972–1986)
• John F. Reed, VP for Education and Director of the Library (November 1992 – June 2003)
• Susan Fraser, Director of the Library (2004 – present)

The collection grew both through purchase of books and through the generous donation of significant botanical and horticultural libraries from notable botanists, gardeners, scientists and book collectors Among the important personal collections to be given to the LuEsther T. Mertz Library are donations from

• Eleanor Cross Marquand
• Sarah Gildersleeve Fife
• Lucien Marcus Underwood
• Robert Hiester Montgomery
• Emil Starkenstein
• John Torrey
• Harriet Barnes Pratt
• David Hosack

Enid A. Haupt Conservatory

The Enid A. Haupt Conservatory is a greenhouse located toward the western end of the NYBG. Inspiration for the park and the conservatory stemmed from Nathaniel Lord Britton and his wife Elizabeth. The couple had visited the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew on their honeymoon and thought a similar park and conservatory should be built for New York City. The conservatory was designed by the major greenhouse company of the late 1890s, Lord and Burnham Co. The design was modeled after the Palm House at the Royal Botanic Garden and Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace in Italian Renaissance style. Groundbreaking took place on January 3, 1899 and construction was completed in 1902 at a cost of $177,000. The building was constructed by John R. Sheehan under contract for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Since the original construction, major renovations took place in 1935, 1950, 1978, and 1993.

 

The Chelsea Physic Garden London (Probably the only place legally growing Cannabis in Central London)

The Chelsea Physic Garden was established as the Apothecaries’ Garden in London, England, in 1673. (The word “Physic” here refers to the science of healing.) This physic garden is the second oldest botanical garden in Britain, after the University of Oxford Botanic Garden, which was founded in 1621.

This little gem of a garden is well worth a visit, it is a short walk from Chelsea Bridge and or Victoria Station.

Its rock garden is the oldest English garden devoted to alpine plants. The largest fruiting olive tree in Britain is there, protected by the garden’s heat-trapping high brick walls, along with what is doubtless the world’s northernmost grapefruit growing outdoors. Jealously guarded during the tenure of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, in 1983 the Garden became a registered charity and was opened to the general public for the first time. The garden is a member of the LondonThe Worshipful Society of Apothecaries initially established the garden on a leased site of Sir John Danvers’ well-established garden in Chelsea, London. This house, called Danvers House, adjoined the mansion that had once been the house of Sir Thomas More. Danvers House was pulled down in 1696 to make room for Danvers Street.

In 1713, Dr Hans Sloane purchased from Charles Cheyne the adjacent Manor of Chelsea, about 4 acres (1.6 ha), which he leased in 1722 to the Society of Apothecaries for £5 a year in perpetuity, requiring only that the Garden supply the Royal Society, of which he was a principal, with 50 good herbarium samples per year, up to a total of 2,000 plants.

That initiated the golden age of the Chelsea Physic Garden under the direction of Philip Miller (1722–1770), when it became the world’s most richly stocked botanic garden. Its seed-exchange program was established following a visit in 1682 from Paul Hermann, a Dutch botanist connected with the Hortus Botanicus Leiden and has lasted till the present day. The seed

exchange program’s most notable act may have been the introduction of cotton into the colony of Georgia and more recently, the worldwide spread of the Madagascar Periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus).

Isaac Rand, a member and a fellow of the Royal Society published a condensed catalogue of the Garden in 1730, Index plantarum officinalium, quas ad materiae medicae scientiam promovendam, in horto Chelseiano. Elizabeth Blackwell’s A Curious Herbal (1737–39) was illustrated partly from specimens taken from the Chelsea Physic Garden. Sir Joseph Banks worked with the Head Gardener and Curator, John Fairbairn during the 1780–1814 period. Fairbairn specialized in growing and cultivating plants from around the world.

Parts of this classic garden have been lost to “development” – the river bank during 1874 construction of the Chelsea Embankment on the north bank of the River Thames, and a strip of the garden to allow widening of Royal Hospital Road. What remains is a 3.5 acres (1.4 ha) patch in the heart of London.

The present chairman of the trust which operates the Garden is Sarah Troughton, Lord Lieutenant of Wiltshire. Museums of Health & Medicine

Hidden Cornwall : Trelissick Gardens, Home To The National Photinia Collection…

Trelissick Garden (Cornish: Lowarth Trelesyk, meaning Garden of Trelesyk; Trelissick, first recorded in 1275, means “Leidic’s farm) is a garden in the ownership of the National Trust at Feock, near Truro, Cornwall, England, United Kingdom.

Trelissick Garden lies within the Cornwall Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). Almost a third of Cornwall has AONB designation, with the same status and protection as a National Park.

Toponymy

N.B. Trelissick in the parish of St Ewe has the same derivation but Trelissick in St Erth and Trelissick in Sithney have a different one (“Gwledic’s farm”).

History

The garden has been in the ownership of the National Trust since 1955 when it was donated by Ida Copeland following the death of her son Geoffrey. A stained glass memorial bearing the Copeland Crest remains to this effect in Feock parish church.

Many of the species that flourish in the mild Cornish air, including the rhododendrons and azaleas which are now such a feature of the garden, were planted by the Copelands including hydrangeas, camellias and flowering cherries, and exotics such as the ginkgo and various species of palm. They also ensured that the blossoms they nurtured had a wider, if unknowing audience. Mr Ronald Copeland was chairman and later managing director of his family’s business, the Spode china factory, and flowers grown at Trelissick were used as models for those painted on ware produced at the works.

The Copeland family crest, a horse’s head, now decorates the weathervane on the turret of the stable block, making a pair with the Gilbert squirrels on the Victorian Gothic water tower, an echo of the family who lived here in the second half of the 19th century (their ancestor, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, was lost at sea in his tiny ship Squirrel after discovering Newfoundland).

The garden is noted for its rare shrubs. It offers a large park, woodland walks, views over the estuary of the River Fal and Falmouth.

Special plants

Trelissick Garden is the home of the National Plant Collections of photinias and azaras

People : DDDD Deborah The Dowager Duchess Of Devonshire, Gardener On A Scale Like No Other…

Deborah Vivien Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire DCVO (née Deborah Freeman-Mitford; 31 March 1920 – 24 September 2014), was the youngest and last surviving of the six Mitford sisters who were prominent members of English society in the 1930s and 1940s.

Life

Known to her family as “Debo”, Deborah Mitford was born in Asthall Manor, Oxfordshire, England. She married Lord Andrew Cavendish, younger son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire, in 1941. When Cavendish’s older brother, William, Marquess of Hartington, was killed in combat in 1944, Cavendish became heir to the dukedom and Marquess of Hartington; in 1950, upon the death of his father, he became the 11th Duke of Devonshire.

The Duchess was the main public face of Chatsworth for many decades. The Duchess wrote several books about Chatsworth, and played a key role in the restoration of the house, the enhancement of the garden and the development of commercial activities such as Chatsworth Farm Shop (which is on a quite different scale from most farm shops as it employs a hundred people); Chatsworth’s other retail and catering operations; and assorted offshoots such as Chatsworth Food, which sells luxury foodstuffs which carry her signature and Chatsworth Design which sells image rights to items and designs from the Chatsworth collections. Recognising the commercial imperatives of running a stately home, she took a very active role and was known to run the ticket office for Chatsworth House herself. She also supervised the development of the Cavendish Hotel at Baslow near Chatsworth and the Devonshire Arms Hotel at Bolton Abbey.

In 1999 the Duchess was appointed a Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (DCVO) by Queen Elizabeth II, for her service to the Royal Collection Trust. Upon the death of her husband in 2004, her son Peregrine Cavendish became the 12th Duke of Devonshire. She became the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire at this time.

She and the duke had seven children, four of whom died shortly after birth:

• Mark Cavendish (born and died 14 November 1941)
• Emma Cavendish (born 26 March 1943, styled Lady Emma Cavendish from 1944), mother of the fashion model Stella Tennant
• Peregrine Cavendish, 12th Duke of Devonshire (born 27 April 1944)
• An unnamed child (miscarried December 1946; he or she was a twin of Victor Cavendish, born in 1947)
• Lord Victor Cavendish (born and died 22 May 1947)
• Lady Mary Cavendish (born and died 5 April 1953)
• Lady Sophia Louise Sydney Cavendish (born 18 March 1957)

She was also a maternal aunt of Max Mosley, former president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), as well as the grandmother of Stella Tennant, a fashion model.

Death

Her death, at the age of 94, was announced on 24 September 2014. The Duchess was survived by three of her seven children, eight grandchildren and eighteen great-grandchildren.

Selected interviews

She was interviewed on her experience of sitting for a portrait for painter Lucian Freud in the BBC series Imagine in 2004.

In an interview with John Preston of the Daily Telegraph, published in September 2007, she recounted having tea with Adolf Hitler during a visit to Munich in June 1937, when she was visiting Germany with her mother and her sister Unity, the latter being the only one of the three who spoke German and, therefore the one who carried on the entire conversation with Hitler. Shortly before ending the interview, Preston asked her to choose with whom she would have preferred to have tea: American singer Elvis Presley or Hitler. Looking at the interviewer with astonishment, she answered: “Well, Elvis of course! What an extraordinary question.”

In 2010, the BBC journalist Kirsty Wark interviewed the Duchess for Newsnight. In it, the Duchess talked about life in the 1930s and 1940s, Hitler, the Chatsworth estate, and the marginalisation of the upper classes. She was also interviewed on 23 December by Charlie Rose for PBS. She spoke of her memoir and other interesting aspects of her life. On 10 November 2010, she was interviewed as part of “The Artists, Poets, and Writers Lecture Series” sponsored by the Frick Collection, an interview which focused on her memoir and her published correspondence with Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Titles from birth

• The Honourable Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford (1920–1941)
• The Lady Andrew Cavendish (1941–1944)
• Marchioness of Hartington (1944–1950)
• Her Grace The Duchess of Devonshire (1950–2004)
• Her Grace The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire (2004-2014)

People : Toby Buckland, Gardener, Designer and Author With A Love Of Father Ted …..

Toby Neale Buckland (born October 1969) is an English gardener, TV presenter and author, best known for being the main presenter from 2008-10 of BBC’s long running flagship gardening programme Gardeners’ World.

In 2008 Toby won RHS Gold and Best in show for his Ethical Garden at Gardeners’ World Live. In 2009 he won the Environmental Award from the Garden Media Guild for a Gardeners’ World Special on peat in gardening.

In October 2011, Toby launched an online plant nursery, Toby Buckland Nurseries, based at Powderham Castle in Devon. He is a brand ambassador for ‘RatedPeople.com.

Biography and education

Born in Exeter, Devon, Toby was brought up in the coastal towns of Dawlish and Kingswear. He trained as a nurseryman at Blyth’s Devon Nursery and later Whetman’s in Devon before studying horticulture, first at Bicton College, Budleigh Salterton, Devon and later Hadlow College of Horticulture and Agriculture, Hadlow, Kent where he trained in Landscape and Amenity management. During that time he spent a year as a horticultural trainee at the University of Cambridge Botanic Garden as a woodland supervisor.

He also worked as a gardener for the author Tom Sharpe and built a garden for the Poet Laureate Andrew Motion.

Toby is married to Lisa, a gardening writer, and has three children, Henry, Eddie and Emma. They live in Dawlish where he gardens on a sloping site the size of two tennis courts and has an allotment nearby.

Toby is now working on opening a nursery in Devon.

Television

Toby’s first job in TV was in 1996 as a horticultural researcher for Brian Lapping Associates working on Channel 4’s Garden Party. In 1998 he then joined the Granada Breeze channel as a gardening presenter which led to TV roles designing and building gardens on shows including Home Front in the Garden, Real Wrecks, Carol Vorderman’s Better Homes and BBC One’s Garden Magic.

He took over from Monty Don as the main presenter on the BBC flagship gardening programme Gardeners’ World in August 2008. The format of the programme changed in various respects and was criticised by some viewers for what they regarded as “dumbing down”. In December 2010, the BBC announced that they would not be renewing Toby’s contract. Three years after recovering from a stroke, Monty Don returned as lead presenter of the show in March 2011.

On 31 December 2010 he appeared on BBC1’s Celebrity Mastermind answering questions on Father Ted (scoring 12 with 1 Pass) and 22 overall with 2 more Passes, coming fourth. He donated his fee to the memorial garden which he designed for 45 Commando Royal Marines.

In May 2011 he appeared as a presenter of the BBC’s coverage of the Royal Horticultural Society Chelsea Flower Show. In 2013, he presented two episodes of Great British Garden Revival.

Other projects

Toby has supported a variety of charities including Perennial, Greenfingers, Thrive and Hospiscare. He has recently designed a memorial garden for 45 Commando Royal Marines.

Bibliography

Toby Buckland has written a number of books, including:

• BBC Gardeners’ World Flowers: Planning and Planting for Continuous Colour April 2011 BBC Books | ISBN 978-1-84607-865-1
• “Gardeners’ World” Practical Gardening Handbook. BBC Books. 4 March 2010. ISBN978-1-84607-854-5.
• How to Make Your Garden Grow. Mitchell Beazley. 2 March 2009. ISBN978-1-84533-505-2.
• 50 Weekend Garden Projects. Cassell Illustrated. 13 February 2003. ISBN978-1-84403-062-0.
• Garden Boundaries. Laurel Glen Publishing. January 2003. ISBN978-1-57145-823-0.

The Garden Makeover Book. Cassell Illustrated. 8 March 2001. ISBN 978-0-304-35894-6.