Chinese Vase with Flowers, a Fig, and a Bean; Giovanna Garzoni, 1625-50

IN HIS unfinished autobiography A Little Learning, the British author Evelyn Waugh remembered fondly his own mother:

My mother was small, neat, reticent and, until her last decade, very active. She had no special literary interests, but read a book a fortnight, always a good one. She would have preferred to live in the country and from her I learned that towns are places of exile where the unfortunate are driven to congregate in order to earn their livings in an unhealthy and unnatural way. She had to be content with walking her dog on Hampstead Heath and working in the garden. She spent hours there, entirely absorbed; not merely snipping off dead heads but potting, planting, watering, weeding. (A man came one or two days a week to dig or mow or roll.) When my father in middle age, after the fashion of the family, chose epitaphs for himself and my mother, he directed that on his side of the gravestone should be inscribed: ‘And another book was opened which is the book of life’ and on my mother’s ‘My beloved is gone down into the garden to gather lilies’; but her flowers did not interest her more than fruit and vegetables. There was nothing pre-Raphaelite about my mother. I associate her less with lilies than with earthy wash-leather gloves and baskets of globe artichokes and black and red currants.

[A Little Learning, Little, Brown and Company, 1964; p. 31]

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