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:
“Indeed, the Englishman’s history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)