Everglades and Proust

View from the Wisteria Walk at Everglades. The Wisteria hasn't bloomed yet.

Today we visited Everglades, a garden Paul Sorensen designed in Leura in the 1930s for Henri Van De Velde. Van De Velde died in 1947 and evidently interest in the garden died with him. The property was sold soon after his death and by the time the National Trust got their hands on it in 1952, it was wildly overgrown. It has since been restored and the garden and house are open throughout the year. 

The garden perches at the top of the Jamison Valley and was designed as a series of formal terraces on one side and a sweeping glade and bush garden on the valley side containing a cool grotto and magnificent lookout terrace. 

View from top terrace

Dry stone walls atop a steep precipice 

The Art Deco house contains a tea-room but is otherwise largely unfurnished. The downstairs bathroom is fiery, a bit too evocative in such a bush-fire prone area, but so unusual: 

I didn't take a photo of the exterior of the house, being averse to Art Deco domestic architecture. It always seems too intrusive and bulky in a garden landscape. 

Carmine azaleas, primulas and bluebells 

Well worth visiting. The garden will look stunning in a couple of weeks when the rhododendrons and wisteria are blooming.

I finished the first volume of Proust's Remembrance of Thing Past, Swann's Way,  this morning. Doesn't he have a wonderful moustache and dreamy expression? Reading is totally a mood thing (for me, at least) and you have to be in the right mood to read Proust, otherwise it could well be tiresome, boring and/or infuriating. Here is a LOL review that examines exactly those qualities and another, by Germaine Greer. The advent of e-readers has meant you can cart around a whole library of books with you wherever you go, which means that you don't miss out on that perfect read for that particular mood. On our recent holiday, when I needed a rest, I immersed myself in Proust's prose and luxuriated in his descriptions. Gradually I found myself carried away with the story. I will leave you with a passage that I hope will leave you feeling refreshed.

He describes a stream after a storm:

"I have seen in its depths a clear crude blue verging on violet, suggesting a floor of Japanese cloisonne. Here and there on the surface, blushing like a strawberry, floated a water-lily flower with a scarlet centre and white edges. Further on, the flowers were more numerous, paler, less glossy, more thickly seeded, more tightly folded, and disposed, by accident, in festoons so graceful that I would fancy I saw floating upon the stream, as after the sad dismantling of some fete galante, moss roses in loosened garlands"