Charlie’s flower room with a large picking of spring flowers from the garden – mixed tulips, anemones, pheasant’s eye narcissus, and bluebells.
Ben Pentreath
It was around that time that House & Garden came to make a film of the house and garden in Dorset. At the time, we didn’t yet have an inkling that we were moving, but now I’m just so grateful that the editor at the time persisted – and that we managed to find a spare day for the little team of filmmakers to visit, on a beautiful summer’s day. It’s a poignant record of a magical time.
A riotous mix of candy-coloured tulips in the cutting beds of the allotment garden. Charlie would plant these every autumn and treats the bulbs as annuals.
Ben Pentreath
When we realised that we would likely be leaving, Charlie and I started recording the house and garden in thousands of photographs, too. It was partly a little memorial, and partly just a way of keeping a record. And because we were just ‘there’, it meant that we took photos of those fleeting glimpses of sunlight, of mist in the valley, or a particular light in the garden, or the precise moment that the leaves of the copper beech tree would burst, or the first snowdrops came into flower; or the table laid for Sunday lunch, or the dining room table set out for our final leaving party. Not a single photo was staged or recreated. We just took snaps as we went. It’s a very different way of looking at a place compared to if we’d commissioned a photographer, for example, to take a record over four seasons, or to visit every month.
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