Garsington Manor

A pleasant walk today took us from the village of Garsington to Denton.

Our picture is of Garsington Manor, a fine Tudor building. For 21 years, the manor was the home to an annual opera season. Unfortunately, some local residents objected to the "noise", claining that the sound of opera was a "nuisance"! The opera performances are now held elsewhere.

Earlier, the Manor had been famous as the home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, who was a regular host to the adherents of the Bloomsbury Group, in particular Virginia Woolf, and to many other artists and authors, who included WB Yeats, LP Hartley, T.S. Eliot, and Augustus John. She reputedly had many lovers, but she was married to Philip Morrell. He was a member of the family that founded Morrell's brewery in Oxford, now taken over, but whose products were well known to me in earlier times...

The spring flowers are flowering everywhere, and there were plenty of places to enjoy them on our walk. This bank of primroses in a rough bit of ground in someone's garden makes a romantic scene.

By the sides of many of the paths, we found violets in unusually great abundance. They made a lovely sight, of course. But, more fascinatingly, in some places there was such a dense cover that we could smell the scent quite strongly in the air. It was definitely the smell we associated with those old-fashioned sweets known as Mulford Violets (or perhaps cheap perfume!). As my last linked picture of today, I thought that I would show a close-up of the delicate flowers.