Tuesday 23rd September 2025

To the Garden Museum Literary Festival, this year at Iford Manor.

There was a theme of ladies-in-waiting.

This broadcast is also How England Really is.

I, Adrian Edge, missed last year’s at Sezincote. The year before, at Parham, Amanda and Stoker didn’t come. But the Riblats did.

For only £150, you are elevated to the Riblats or Amanda and Stoker.

This year, we saw Stoker in the middle of the field, near the lunch tent. Royston King was on him at once. Not ‘Your Grace! Your Grace!’ as at Houghton, in 2019. But ‘Stoker, Stoker.’ ‘Hello, I’m Stoker.’ ‘Has Amanda come?’ ‘Did you bring your driver?’ ‘No, I came by taxi.’ At lunch, Stoker was sitting alone. It was self-collect from a buffet, seating at long tables. He had a notebook and an iPhone. Our direction was clear. What an opportunity. Almost unbelievable. The 12th Duke of Devonshire. Quite alone. The field completely clear. Nothing to stop us. But on the way we came upon our favourite Museum Director lunching. ‘I think Stoker’s happy on his own,’ he said.

So we went no further.

All the same – the elevation.

The pre-lunch talk was Thomas Pakenham, in fact Long Longford, on trees. He’s 92. Many interesting facts not known to me, Adrian Edge, previously – such as that Magnolia Campbelli was in fact discovered by Hooker who named it after Archibald Campbell, the administrator of his plant-hunting expedition. The compare of the talk was called Campbell-Preston. Afterwards I asked her if by any chance she was in Waiting to Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. ‘That was my mother-in-law,’ she said.

By the lunch buffet I ran into Tom Stuart Smith. ‘Hello, I’m Adrian Edge.’ ‘Yes, I know you,’ he goes. Blinding. Tom Stuart Smith knows me, Adrian Edge.

Anyway, the thing is, his grandmother was Lizzie Motion, who was in Waiting to Her Late Majesty Queen Mary.

So that made a theme of Ladies-in-Waiting.

There was a tour of the Garden then a talk with Tom Stuart Smith (which was heaven). So many confessions! Such as how he couldn’t resist the yellow azaleas at Crocus for his Chelsea Garden which cost him Best in Show because the self-appointed ‘brief’ was ‘drought-resistant’ therefore azaleas impossible.

Stoker was in the front row for the talk, busy writing in his notebook.

There was a tour of the garden. Then I had to leave by car for the Gay Mother’s.

I’d always thought Iford was in the middle of Bradford-on-Avon. It isn’t. Its glory is the setting … in a vale, no other houses except the manor, a fine Palladian facade but a gentleman’s house, not a mansion, beside a lane and a river, unchanged for centuries. Somehow extraordinary that such a facade would occur in the middle of nowhere like that. Sir Harold Peto, I think, put a grand Italian statue on the bridge before the house.

The garden is architectural, by Sir Harold Peto. Edwardian. Quite nice. Except the Japanese garden, horrid and damp. It’s got an Appian Way, an Etruscan colonnade and a Florentine cloister, all cleverly inserted into a smallish space. But no flowers to speak of. Nor shrubs of great interest. But that will change.