Mrs Cornflower and Lady Croom

Cornflower is troubled by her husband's violent assault on the garden, which she fears may destroy more than it creates.  She should read Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, which while it will not give much comfort, will amuse enormously, and set her worries in a wider historical context.  It's a positive marvel of a play (why no plays in the Cornflower Book Group?), and it's just being revived in London at the moment.

Lady Croom has a lovely garden.  But her husband has invited in Richard Noakes, a landscape architect, to "improve" it.  Read, and weep:

Lady Croom: Your drawing is a very wonderful transformation. I;would not have recognized my own garden but for your ingenious book - is it not? - look! Here is the Park as it appears to us now, and here as it might be when Mr Noakes has done with it. Where there is the familiar pastoral refinement of an Englishman's garden, here is an eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins where there was never a house, of water dashing against rocks where there was neither spring nor a stone I could not throw the length of a cricket pitch. My hyacinth dell is become a haunt for hobgoblins, my Chinese bridge, which I am assured is superior to the one at Kew, and for all I know at Peking, is usurped by a fallen obelisk overgrown with briars.

Noakes:   (Bleating) Lord Little has one very similar -

Lady Croom:  I cannot relieve Lord Little's misfortunes by

adding to my own.  Pray, what is this rustic hovel that presumes to superpose itself on my gazebo?

Noakes: That is the hermitage, madam.

Lady Croom: I am bewildered

Brice: It is all irregular, Mr Noakes.

Noakes: It is, sir. Irregularity is one of the chiefest principles of the picturesque style.

Lady Croom:  But Sidley Park is already a picture, and a most amiable picture too. The slopes are green and gentle. The trees are companionably grouped at intervals that show them to advantage. The rill is a serpentine ribbon unwound from the lake peaceably contained by meadows on which the right amount of sheep are tastefully arranged - in short, it is nature as God intended. 

 

… … …  

 

Lady Croom:  Mr Noakes!
Noakes: Your ladyship -
Lady Croom:  What have you done to me!
Noakes: Everything is satisfactory, I assure you.  A little behind, to be sure, but my dam will be repaired within the month -
Lady Croom: (Banging the table) Hush!
           (In the silence, the steam engine thumps in the distance.)
Can you hear, Mr Noakes?
Noakes: (Pleased and proud) The Improved Newcomen steam pump - the only one in England!
Lady Croom:  That is what I object to.  If everybody had his own I could bear my portion of the agony without complaint.  But to have been singled out by the only Improved Newcomen steam pump in England, this is hard, sir, this is not to be borne.
Noakes: Your lady -
Lady Croom: And for what?  My lake is drained to a ditch for no purpose I can understand, unless it be that snipe and curlew have deserted three counties so that they may be shot in our swamp.  What you painted as forest is a mean plantation, your greenery is mud, your waterfall is wet mud, and your mount is an opencast mine.  (Pointing through the window)  What is that cowshed?
Noakes: The hermitage, my lady?
Lady Croom: It is a cowshed.
Noakes: Madam, it is, I assure you, a very habitable cottage, properly founded and drained, two rooms and a closet under a slate roof and a stone chimney -
Lady Croom: And who is to live in it?
Noakes: Why, the hermit.

Lady Croom: Where is he?

Noakes: Madam?
Lady Croom: You surely do not supply a hermitage without a hermit?
Noakes: Indeed, madam -
Lady Croom: Come, come, Mr Noakes.  If I am promised a fountain I expect it to come with water.  What hermits do you have?

 Good luck, Cornflower!

Comments

[glo]

Very funny. Although I would love to be an interior architect, I wouldn't let my house or garden redecorated by someone else!
Isn't L'Hermittage the name of the most famous museum in Saint Petersburg?

[Cornflower]

Thankyou, dear friend, your sympathy is touching!
Latest news is that 'he' has taken my amelanchier (a perfectly good specimen) and is currently excavating what could be a well. Maybe I'll get a rill after all? No hobgoblins installed as yet, but little hope of a hyacinth dell, either.
Should London life become too oppressive, Lindsay, you might consider becoming our hermit - reasonable food and a ready supply of books!