COMMON SENSE & EVIDENCE # 93, for March 6
Barbados in Bloom
Professor Henry Fraser
“The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth
One is nearer God’s Heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.”
Barbados in Bloom is an absolute delight – and I mean both the magnificent photographic extravaganza just published by Wordsmith International, and the place we sometimes call Paradise. With the lower rainfall in February, after a particularly long and heavy rainy season, the colour of our gardens is more splendid every day, and I predict a spectacular garden season – both lush and full of colour.
The gardens of Barbados have always been praised by travel writers, in spite of our low rainfall and thin soil. Schombergk, in his History of Barbados (1848) refers to the gardens of Mr. Piers at Staple Grove as being the best in the island, while the gardens at Farley Hill were almost legendary. Sir Graham Briggs, the wealthy radical who supported the radical governor Pope-Henessey and was read out of the Bridgetown Club for his pains and literally exiled to Nevis, was also an avid collector, antiquarian and horticulturist. He introduced exotic plants, including the first Norfolk Pine on the island.
Governor Lord Seaforth had a great interest in plants, and Government House Gardens were virtually a “staging post” for the Botanical Gardens of St. Vincent. It still has one of the finest cannon ball trees on the island and many other exotica. And Lady Carter, designer of Ilaro Court and the gardens at Queen’s Park, had a free hand as a landscape architect. Queen’s Park tended to follow the nineteenth century Bajan-Victorian tradition of walled, geometric garden designs, while Ilaro Court, a few years later and on hilly terrain, was much bolder.
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