![]() ![]() Nichols’s delight in his cyclamen was nothing against the pride he felt for the December-to-March flowers he cultivated, proving there is more to cold-weather blooms than snowdrops, winter jasmine and Christmas roses. ![]() You don’t have to be a gardener to read Nichols. Pirouette, “with the wild scamper of a Francis Thompson ode.” While it doesn’t hurt to know that rocks in a rockery must be set in sandy loam and that dock leaves are good for wrapping butter, obviously ![]() The cyclamen Nichols nursed at the thatched, half-timbered Tudor cottage he bought in 1928 in the British Midlands ultimately flourished, uniting “the formal rhythm of a sonnet,” Nichols rhapsodized with a sudden Here he is fatally associating cyclamens, those “vulgar, obvious plants” whose seedsįailed to grow for him after 10 weeks in pots, with “tiresome women who live in flats with electric stoves and indigestion and a Pekingese snoring in the scullery.” Who specialized in winter flowers, regularly crescendoed to the point where he could literally have you laughing out loud. The most amusing garden writer of all times, Nichols (1898-1985), If you are any sort of gardener at all, you know that this is the time of year, when hoar frost is on the twig, that held the greatest charm for Beverley Nichols. Photographs courtesy of the Bryan Connon Collection Nichols on the grounds of Merry Hall, the Georgian manor house near Ashstead in Surrey where he lived from 1946 to 1956. ![]()
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