History
The gardens were planted from 1946 onwards, under the eye of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother. It was J.B. Stevenson of Tower Court who urged the selection of the Kurume azaleas for the Punch Bowl and it was his famous collection of rhododendrons which was added to the Gardens in the 1940s after his death. It is worth noting that all this work was undertaken at a time of great austerity. The publicity at the time said, the Gardens "always open to the public would provide pleasant hours of relaxation for many a tired worker from factory or office". They were and should remain "private gardens accessible to the public".
Read more about this topic: Valley Gardens
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)