The Alde Valley Spring Festival

Suffolk’s famously dry, realist poet George Crabbe lived in Great Glemham at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. His son George later described the time he spent in the village as a child as the ‘Alhambra’ of his existence. In a biography of his father’s life he also gave accounts of the family following his father along local footpaths as he read to them from books – or going out from their house into the garden to tend their ‘plats’.

Crabbe was a keen botanist as well as a poet. He lived at a time in which the work of Carl Linnaeus was inspiring many to undertake their own personal taxonomic research into wild plants and animals. Crabbe compiled a plant list for the area which, as noted above, survives as an appendix in a History of Framlingham and its District published in 1806. In reading his son’s biography, it is both engaging and moving to picture the family walking along local lanes or tending to their individual beds in the shared garden of their home in the centre of the village

Today, in the early 21st century, Great Glemham still feels like a village of gardens. The soil is deep and fertile. Most of the farm land is what might be called ‘meadow land’: a soft, comfortable mix of loam and sand that covers the middle slopes of the small valleys that surround the village. Above this, on the ‘topland’, the soil changes to heavy clay. And lower down, it shifts from loam to sand; and then alluvial soils and peat in the floodplain. There is, in effect, a soil for all seasons. And on slopes with a southerly aspect, of which there are many, the earth is generously warmed by the sun, when it chooses to shine.

The largest of the gardens in the village are those around Great Glemham House, now in the care of my brother [and architect] Argus and my sister-in-law [and gardener / writer] Tilly. Miraculously, the gardens, covering over 12 acres, have survived almost intact in a layout and design that was first conceived in the early 19th century. It is a thoughtfully planned and abundantly productive combination of a walled kitchen garden, herbaceous borders, lawns and shrubberies. The survival of all components of the house – its family quarters, its service wing, walled garden, shrubberies, park, lake and winding drive – seems to be very rare, if not unique, in the East of England.

Beyond the boundaries of Great Glemham House and the adjoining Timber Yard Farm, and tucked behind walls, hedges and homes all around the village, are many other private gardens of varying sizes, each reflecting the history of the dwelling of which they are part and the botanical or culinary interests of past and present owners. Overall, it feels like a rich tapestry to explore. To this end, we are very excited to be working with the artist and gardener Claudia Silva, whose paintings we first showed at the farm in 2024.

As with Ian Sedge, we are delighted to be collaborating with a new artist on a theme that seems so resonant not just with the local landscape but also with East Anglia’s rich heritage of artists who are gardeners or keen botanists, or artists whose work often featured views of their gardens : Sir Cedric Morris, John Nash, Richard Chopping, John Morley, Mary Potter, Mary Fedden and Margaret Thomas all come to mind.

For this year’s Spring Festival Exhibitions, we are presenting a selection of over 15 new oil paintings and watercolours by Claudia. Some are from her own studio or garden, looking out from the village centre into the adjoining Vale of Great Glemham. Others are from the gardens of nearby neighbours and the walled garden of Great Glemham House. As her work gains confidence, it pleasing to see it begin to gain the broader recognition it so richly deserved.

As with Ian, this presentation of beautiful new watercolours and oil paintings by Claudia for the 2025 Alde Valley Spring Festival will pave the way to a larger solo show in the summer of 2026.

If you would like more information about Claudia’s paintings, including commissions, please email us at : enquiries@aldevalleyspringfestival.co.uk

Jason Gathorne-Hardy [curator]

November 2025. White House Farm, Great Glemham

Catalogue: Gardens of Great Glemham

For more information about Claudia Silva’s work please contact:

enquiries@aldevalleyspringfestival.co.uk

Our residency collaboration with Jenny Nutbeem began several years ago with a walk around the pastures at White House Farm. Our original plan was to explore paper making and botanical printing, using plant materials gathered from the fields and headlands that surround the farmhouse.

Our walk veered off into a nearby wood called Rookyard Belt, which is home to the farm’s only population of truly wild cherry trees – all others seem to have been planted at some point in the past. There are only a few of these wild trees. All of them are tall and thin with meandering trunks, growing under much larger oaks, sweet chestnuts and sycamores. In reaching upwards to the light, their stems have become long and leggy, growing sideways as much as upwards in order to reach pockets of sunshine.

One tree had collapsed on to the ground and died. As its trunk had slowly rotted, layers of bark had peeled off like strips of dark, shiny leather. Jenny collected some, to see what sort of colour it might yield if used as a natural dye. To her surprise, the bark gave a beautiful golden brown colour. This prompted her to look at the young Japanese flowering cherries that are dotted around the farmyards and to wonder whether dyes and botanical prints made from the blossom and leaves of these trees could be combined with the rich golden colour derived from the bark of the fallen wild cherry tree in the woods.

The results were stunning : a small collection of sumptuous silk scarves and smaller samples of fabric, all printed and dyed with blossom and leaves gathered from the flowering cherry trees at the farm, combined in some cases with the dye from the bark of the fallen wild cherry, as well as pigments extracted from other plants found in nearby fields and hedgerows.

Over the intervening years, the focus of Jenny’s residency collaboration has shifted from textiles and natural dyes in general to seasonal collections of Suffolk Sakura Silk Scarves. These are all made with leaves and blossom carefully picked from the farm’s flowering cherry trees. The spring collections feature tumbling blossom, all caught in beautifully dyed designs on narrow lengths of silk. In turn, the autumn collections feature leaves from the many different varieties of cherry trees now growing here.

The flowering cherry trees have their own heritage. Almost all of the varieties now growing at the farm are connected to the lives of Collingwood Ingram and Mr Masatoshi Asari – two of the world’s great cherry guardians of the 20th and 21st centuries. Jenny’s wonderful Suffolk Sakura Silk Scarves celebrate this heritage. They are luxurious garments, as well as works of art. They capture a little piece of the history Japanese flowering cherries in the UK.

For this year’s Christmas Exhibition, we are very excited to welcome a small collection of autumnal creations from Jenny’s studio, all made with fallen leaves gathered from our young cherry trees at the farm.

If you would like more information about Jenny’s Suffolk Sakura Silk Scarves, including commissions, please contact us at :

enquiries@aldevalleyspringfestival.co.uk