Tulips and peacocks? For gardeners they are not exactly a match made in heaven. Peacocks on lawns look lovely in photographs but in real life they shriek to one another like children in pain. The sound is most unnerving in a garden. A peacock also likes to scratch around in flower beds and when he fans out his tail to impress a peahen, he flattens plants when he lowers it. He is no more compatible with tulips. This weekend they are already starting to show above ground. When they come into bud, a courting peacock would break them.
Artistically, tulips and peacocks are a happier match. They appear in Asian art, especially on patterns for tiles and carpets, where they do no damage to plants in reality. I relish them because art is sometimes shaped by gardens and gardens by art. I have just been enjoying an excellent show that makes me see both sides of the subject differently. At the elegant William Morris Museum in Walthamstow, east London, the exhibition William Morris & Art from the Islamic World runs until March 9. It is small, well co-ordinated and a tribute to its curators. Admission is free.
The Victorian arts and craftsman William Morris had two superb peacocks in his dining room at Kelmscott Manor, his country retreat in Oxfordshire. They had turquoise in their tails but were not living birds. In the 1870s they had been cast in brass, probably near Isfahan, now Iran, before Morris bought them. He was very proud of them and loaned them to exhibitions in London. He also designed a textile pattern called “Peacock and Dragon” and a carpet pattern called “Peacock and Bird”. However, he did not keep living peacocks in his garden.
He had tulips there instead. His daughter, May Morris, recalled that “the peony and the wild tulip were two of the richest blossomings of the spring garden at the Manor”. In the 1870s Morris devised a tulip pattern for cotton textiles, a tulip and lily one for a carpet and in 1884, registered a tulip and peony pattern for a wallpaper.
His original tulips and peonies are not visible in the replanted garden at Kelmscott but I have always enjoyed thinking of its influence on Morris’s eye. His willow-patterned wallpaper has remained a classy option for decorators. His Snakeshead carpet pattern is one of several that show flowers of the snakeshead fritillary, Fritillaria meleagris. Willows flourish by the river Thames at Kelmscott and fritillaries still grow wild in the water meadows.
Morris lived among them, but art was an intermediary between himself and what he showed of nature. As he was a famous member of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, I have looked on his patterns as tributes to the flowery settings of 15th-century Italian paintings. Botticelli’s Primavera has a flower-spangled foreground, as does Fra Angelico’s marvellous painting of the Annunciation, which hangs in the civic museum in Cortona, the Umbrian town where it was first displayed in a church. Their patterns are so apt for Morris’s designs. Many of them are rather crowded, but I have assumed they were packing in a blend of Italian art and some flowers from his Victorian garden.
The Walthamstow exhibition corrects this superficial view. Again and again his patterns owe debts to Islamic art, examples of which were known, even owned, by Morris himself. The exhibition and its beautifully produced book Tulips and Peacocks (Yale, 2024), demonstrate the fact. In the dining room in his London house Morris hung a beautiful 16th-century carpet from Kerman with a pattern like a Persian garden: this “vase” carpet is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Tulips, dianthus and roses on decorated tiles from the Islamic world inspired his representation of flowers and stems and his distribution of them in his designs. He worked for more than a year on writing out and decorating a book of Fitzgerald’s famous translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the Persian poet. The exhibition shows it under a glass case, and even shows the big cloth that was draped over Morris’s coffin for his funeral. It stitched together two velvet hangings made in 17th-century Bursa, in Ottoman Turkey. Their pattern of stylised tulips accompanied him to the grave.
Morris’s fascination with patterns in the arts of Islamic lands belonged in a wider context. At the very same time, William De Morgan was copying such patterns on his vivid tiles, now collectors’ items, and the artist Frederic Leighton was adding an Arab Hall to his orientalising house in Holland Park, London, now the Leighton Museum. “Damascus rooms” were being installed for London patrons. Morris’s knowledge came from reading books in English and from items seen out of their social and religious contexts. He never went to Asia, but his daughter May visited Morocco and Egypt and even wore a blend of Egyptian robes.
In Egypt, May bought a nice pair of red slippers. When she embroidered panels depicting spring and autumn, she devised tulips in it in an oriental style. One chapter in the accompanying book tries to force these responses into a distorting, modish channel, mentioning “cultural appropriation”, with “Imperialism” thrown into the mix, before the author graciously concludes that Morris’s resulting designs should not be “cancelled”. In arts and crafts one sight can lead innocently to another. Creative misunderstanding is frequent. As for those slippers, May Morris bought them in a bazaar where a local seller was surely happy to find a client and be paid.
In gardens our tulips are not the tulips of early Turkish gardens, prototypes for the ones that Morris patterned. The nearest we can come to them in the modern trade is the horned tulip, Tulipa acuminata, but I have never kept it alive for more than two seasons in a garden. Instead, alerted by Morris, I will look more thoughtfully on carpet patterns as a springboard for gardens’ designs.
Carpet and embroidery patterns have been applied in gardens to evergreen parterres, sometimes known as broderies. The favoured candidate for them has been evergreen box, but box moth and box blight have ruled it out until resistant varieties are on the market. Evergreen Euonymus japonicus Jean Hugues is taller and a darker green, but at present the best alternative.
Instead of clipped parterres I could plan flat beds, seen from above, with a carpet pattern as an inspiration. A swirling line of, say, Kew Gardens, the single white rose, could flow through a surrounding contrast of a low evergreen. Ceanothus thyrsiflorus repens is hardy and dense except after an exceptionally cold winter. Tulips, of course, could grow up through the gaps in spring. The problem is that plants are not obedient to a pattern as they grow. They have to be clipped and shaped frequently.
I prefer to play with an older concept, an “enamelled lawn”. Before lawnmowers existed, individual plants were spaced out in grass which was scythed or cut to control it. Individual mini clumps of low-growing irises, helianthemums, hardy geraniums or Michaelmas daises could “enamel” the grass in swirling patterns, breaking up its flatness. Seen from above, they look like a carpet, though they are maintainable only in a smallish area. So here is what the Morris exhibition has sown in my mind: try to “enamel” a pattern outdoors and look down on it in short grass. Keep peacocks out of the picture. Confine them indoors on silent tiles.
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