THE village which inspired possibly the most famous love poem involving a garden is, appropriately, opening its gardens to the public next weekend.
More than a dozen gardens in the castle village of Brancepeth, to the south of Durham, open their gates to raise money for charity on Saturday when there will also be refreshments in the village hall, a beekeeping demonstration and music from the Northumbrian pipes.
Perhaps they will play the late Victorian music hall hit, Come Into the Garden, Maud, as its lyrics are said to have been composed in Brancepeth in the 1850s by the Poet Laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson:
Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone,
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad
And the musk of the rose is blown.
Much of Brancepeth’s fine properties were built as estate houses, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, connected to the castle.
In 1796, William Russell, a Sunderland banker and coalmine owner, bought the ruinous Norman castle, probably hoping to find coal beneath its ancient towers.
His son, Matthew, who was reputedly the richest commoner in the country, lavished a fortune on it and the village over the next couple of decades. With the help of his wife, Elizabeth, he added towers to the castle and laid out formal gardens.
Matthew died in 1822 and the impetus might have been lost had not Elizabeth’s brother, George Tennyson, who was a huge Gothic fan, taken over the project.
Their nephew was Alfred, whom Elizabeth supported financially when he was struggling poet, and he often stayed at the castle.
It was there in the formal gardens one perfumed evening in 1855 that he wrote the famous lines trying to entice his lover Maud into the shrubbery.
The opening lines read as a romance, but in its full length, much of it written at Tennyson’s home on the Isle of Wight, it is a dark poem: the narrator is struggling with the suicide of his father, he kills his sweetheart’s brother in a duel and goes to fight in the Crimea in the hope of finding redemption.
It was a big success as a melodramatic poem when Tennyson published it in 1856, but in the 1860s, it took on new life as music hall love song, with only the merest hint of consensual slap and tickle among the rhododendrons, when the operatic composer Michael Balfe set it to music.
But in the 1890s, it gained notoriety when saucy singer Marie Lloyd adopted it as one of her signature tunes.
In 1895, she was called before the London County Council’s Vigilance Committee which was investigating whether lewd acts such as hers were damaging public morals as campaigners claimed.
Marie sang a couple of numbers to the committee without any embellishment, including a song that she called I Sits Amongst the Cabbages and Leeks although usually when she performed it to her bawdy audience it was She Sits Among the Cabbages and Peas.
The committee, not seeing the double meaning, agreed they could not object to her simple songs with their innocent lyrics.
But then Marie launched into an innuendo-laden version of Come Into the Garden, Maud, full of winks, leers, nudges and glimpses of knicker elastic, and she stunned and shocked the prudish committee. Marie argued as she left that it proved rudeness was “all in the mind”.
The reputation of Maud, and the suggestion that really naughty things might go on in the gardens at Brancepeth, was now established.
Following in this tradition of innuendo, the Brancepeth Bloomers ensure that today the village streets are full of floral colour. Last year, they won the Best Small Village in the Beautiful Durham awards and a several medals in the Northumbria in Bloom competition.
On Saturday, from 11am to 4.30pm, the village is taking part in the National Open Garden Scheme with refreshments in the village hall, which this year is celebrating its 100th anniversary, raising money for its roof.
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