Manderley’s Shadows and Rhododendrons: Daphne du Maurier’s Gardened Imagination
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
May 13, 1907
Birth of Daphne du Maurier, the English novelist whose pages grow thick with leaves—rhododendrons fifty feet tall, azaleas perfuming memory, and hothouse orchids with a hint of danger.
Her work inspired Alfred Hitchcock (Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, and The Birds), and her gardens haunt and bewitch.
From Rebecca:
I saw that the garden had obeyed the jungle law, even as the woods had done.
The rhododendrons stood fifty feet high, twisted and entwined with bracken, and they had entered into alien marriage with a host of nameless shrubs, poor, bastard thing that clung about their roots as though conscious of their spurious origin.
A lilac had mated with a copper beech, and to bind them yet more closely to one another, the malevolent ivy, always an enemy to grace, had thrown her tendrils about the pair and made them prisoners.
And from The King’s General:
I was a tiny child again at Radford, my uncle’s home, and he was walking me through the glass houses in the gardens. There was one flower, an orchid, that grew alone; it was the color of pale ivory, with one little vein of crimson running through the petals. The scent filled the house, honeyed and sickly sweet. It was the loveliest flower I had ever seen.
I stretched out my hand to stroke the soft velvet sheen, and swiftly my uncle pulled me by the shoulder.
‘Don’t touch it, child. The stem is poisonous.'
Her daughters recalled a home always filled with flowers; on the page, too, the blooms never quite behave.
