Edwardian Country Life: The Story of H. Avray Tipping [Hardcover]

An excellent and richly illustrated book.

A real treat. Often figures such as Tipping can be overlooked in the wider scheme of history, but the book focuses on a man with such a broad understanding of our architectural and horticultural place in the world, that it is worth a look.

Gives a brilliant picture of the homes and gardens he [Tipping] made and the mileu in which he moved.

Helena Gerrish now lives at High Glanau; she has not only restored Tipping's fine garden and opened up its far-reaching views, but with this excellent and richly illustrated book has succeeded too in rescuing its talented maker from near obscurity.

If Tipping remains a private and rather enigmatic man, this superb book does his acheivements full justice. All who are interested in gardens will find it a delight to read and study.

Gerrish has revived both his memory and one of his gardens… It is a fine effort and I rally to her hero's principles of landscaping - "to retain the grace and feeling of the wild, while adding the eclectic beauty of the cultured". If the pull of the country catches you, remember Tipping's words.

One pleasure of 2011 has been Helena Gerrish's 'Edwardian Country Life', the story of Henry Tipping garden designer, architectural historian, maker of three important gardens in Wales and a general bundle of gentlemanly Edwardian energy. It is good to read about the Arts and Crafts movelment in gardens without finding it to be undiluted Lutyens-and Jeykll, and Gerrish's generous array of illustrations helps to fill out our picture of Edwardian gardens as well as reminding us that garden making has never stopped at the River Severn.

Well ordered, well written and superbly illustrated.

A fascinating account of this intriguing man.

Helena Gerrish has made it her business to rediscover this enigmatic man, his gardens, sketches and photographs; her book makes for fascinating reading.

Such a life looks a bit self-indulgent to say the least. But packaged up in this fine book, it leaves an invaluable legacy.

Has added much to our knowledge of the development of spacious gardens in the twentieth century.

A lavishly illustrated book, which, as it revelas connections with so many influential figures in the early 20th century, provides an enjoyable glimpse of many familiar people and places.

This elegantly written and sumptuously illustrated study of Henry Avray is a triumph.

Henry Avray Tipping (1855-1933) was a wealthy architectural historian and garden designer. As Architectural Editor of Country Life he made it essential reading for everyone interested in Britain's great country houses, their furnishings and their gardens.



Tipping restored a bishop's palace for himself and his mother, built one of the last important country houses in which to entertain the Edwardian great and good, and, after the First World War, commissioned his ideal 'cottage'. Always the garden came first; each was a perfect Edwardian idyll.



As a fine gardener herself, the author describes Tipping's own Monmouthshire gardens at Mathern Palace, Mounton House and her own High Glanau Manor, as well as gardens he designed for others, notably at Chequers and Dartington Hall. Tipping, who had no family of his own, was central to the lives and work of such distinguished garden designers as Robinson, Jekyll and Peto.

Introduction



Henry Avray Tipping was a much respected academic, writer, collector and patron (1). For over forty years he had visited and accurately recorded nearly every important country house in Britain and his influential articles for Country Life, accompanied by superb photographs, detailed the social, historical and architectural development of each property. He was a pioneer in the writing of finely illustrated and authoritative books on houses, gardens and furniture and became a major influence on the history of taste. In his own time he lived the life of an Edwardian country gentleman and was the centre of a network of architects, designers and wealthy patrons; yet he always strove to protect his private life and on his death in November 1933 he ordered that all his personal papers should be burnt. Perhaps that is the reason his name is so little known - although anyone who does research on the architecture and gardens of the great British houses will soon come across it.



Although his character was enigmatic and his style of life reclusive in his final years, Tipping had a gift for friendship. In the Oxford of Pater and Ruskin he wore his hair long and sported a hyacinth in his buttonhole, proving to be a fine actor as well as a first class historian. He had an incisive manner of speech and an unusual way of expressing himself, but he was genial, amusing, generous to his friends and, according to his colleague Ralph Edwards, 'supremely self-confident and resolutely determined to get his own way'. His passion for plants, flowers and trees, designing gardens for himself and for others, was shared with his friends Harold Peto and George Herbert Kitchin. He discovered Iford Manor with Peto and often stayed there during the early years of that garden's evolution when the site was transformed into Italianate terraces connected by romantic steps, to make the perfect setting for Peto's architectural fragments and sculptures. Tipping wrote with great admiration about the garden in Country Life in 1910, 'if the relative spheres and successful inter-marriage of formal and natural gardening are better understood today than ever before, that desirable result is due to the efforts of no one man more than to Mr. Peto'. The architect George Herbert Kitchin, whose traditional Arts and Crafts home and garden at Compton End near Winchester was illustrated in Country Life in 1919, was a lifelong friend and trusted architectural adviser. He drew the sketches of buildings for many of Tipping's books, and the garden design for Compton End is the endpaper for Tipping's last publication The Garden of Today. Recently discovered, Kitchin's sketch books form a pictorial diary of Tipping's life, from his birthplace at Ville d'Avray, his homes at Mathern Palace, Mounton House and High Glanau in Monmouthshire, right up to Harefield House in Middlesex where he died; and they give a charming insight into their joint visits to village churches and old country homes, their holidays with Jack Tremayne of Heligan and architectural jaunts to Ned Lutyens's new houses or Gertrude Jekyll's home at Munstead Wood (2).