Lacock
Jany 22
My dear Constance
Today was very fine but cold. The thermometer is ten degrees lower than last week, when it was so fine that the spring flowers resolved to come up. We have now some yellow Crocusses in flower, which perhaps you have not at Bath. Wilkins <1> is sending you a bouquet per carrier – including your favorite Chimonanthus which is flowering abundantly this year – I desired him to add a Primula denticulata to the bouquet. I have been out in the garden admiring several things especially the Luculia gratissima, and the Chorozema which is quite a large bush all covered with flowers – There is an extraordinary plant in the stove, called Aspidistra its flowers are brown stars level with the ground, quite stemless – unlike anything else & worth cultivating for their singularity. The nurserymen sell it for its variegated leaves which are uninteresting; its flowers are hardly known to them.
The high wind on Tuesday night tore off a great branch of the old willow tree – between Wilkins’s cottage and the conservatory. One examination the remaining part was judged unsafe and has therefore been cut down. The tree was probably 100 years old – On this day week Parliament reassembles and then all this flood of Theology in the Times<2> will come to an end, which has at any rate fill’d its columns if it has not much enlightened the public mind. Please thank Ela<3> for Connie’s<4> portrait.
Your affte
Henry
Notes:
1. George Wilkins (b. 1814), gardener at Lacock.
2. Reports on the discussion within the Liberal Party concerning the teaching of religion in schools. See ‘The Nonconformists of the North’, The Times (London), Friday, 22 January 1875, p. 9.
3. Ela Theresa Talbot (1835–1893), WHFT’s 1st daughter.
4. Constance Stewart, née Gilchrist-Clark (b. 1863), ‘Connie’, WHFT’s Scottish granddaughter.
5. The Sunday service at Irongate Cathedral at Albery, near Guildford, was disrupted by a Captain Symes, wishing to deliver a message from God and drawing first a sword and then a revolver when asked not to. "Extraordinary Scene in a Church’, Daily News (London), 20 January 1875.