I went along to Henallt House quite early, but Françoise told me later that they had been busy all evening, up until 10pm (I was chatting to her before the talk about the legal action to save the River Wye, which I will talk about in a later post).
The exhibits in the house are beautifully laid out. There seems at first to be only a small display - but they all go into such detail! I was very impressed with the display of cords made from different plants - Cordage by Sarah Putt - with all sorts of plants from banana to wheat.
Each room is dedicated to a different author or other famous person. So The Pencil of Nature, with the cordage and the botanical illustrations, is dedicated to Henry Fox Talbot the early photographer, and across the hall is Richard Booth's Kingdom of Books, with a lovely Beatrix Potter display in one corner - she is being recognised as a serious illustrator of nature now, rather than just a writer of children's books.
Upstairs two of the rooms are dedicated to Tristan Gooley (How to Read Water) and Robert Macfarlane (Underland) - two recent books that are best sellers. In the Brent Elliot/Flora room I learned that there are 30 plants with 'Angel' in their name, and in the Claire Wilcox/Patchwork room I learned that French linen used to be sent to Haiti to be bleached, to give it a fashionable blue-white tint.
Upstairs again is a room dedicated to the night sky, named for Jun'ichiro Tanazaki, and one dedicated to the French author Colette. Jun'ichiro Tanazaki was a Japanese novelist who wrote an essay called In Praise of Shadows, and at the end of Colette's life a publisher called Mermod, from Lausanne, sent bouquets to her regularly, which she wrote about in Pour un herbier, a book of twenty two short essays.
There's also an exhibit of the Earth drowning in plastic. There are small notices all around the exhibition giving extra information, and many of these are reproduced in the copy of the Cabbage Leaf that was being handed out to visitors as they came into the house. The notice for this exhibit had the title "5.25 trillion pieces", which is the estimated number of pieces of plastic in the ocean right now.
Signs in the Patchwork room talked about the impact of the fashion industry on the natural world, from the amount of water needed to produce one pair of jeans (3,780 litres) to carbon emissions (8 - 10% of all carbon emissions and rising) and micro plastics (2.2 million tonnes of microfibres from clothes entering the oceans every year).
In the How to Read Water room, along with the display of pottery and clay pipes found by mudlarks on the River Thames, there was information about the 500 poultry farms in Shropshire, Herefordshire and Powys, and their impact on the River Wye, polluted rivers across the UK, and ice caps melting at a rate of 420 billion tonnes per year, leading to rising sea levels.
The little display of butterflies on the landing (dedicated to Charles Darwin) noted that the numbers of Monarch butterflies overwintering in Mexico has fallen by 59% because of pesticide use and climate change, while in the UK the numbers of common butterfly species on farmland has fallen by 58% due to modern agricultural practices.
Also scattered about the house are a series of wooden puppets, each with a different costume created by Maizie Hardy. There's a Welsh woman in a costume made from scraps of Welsh blankets, a Georgian dress covered in wild flowers called Lady of the Meadows, and The Queen of the Night in black velvet and silver sparkles. The puppet in the Gardening alcove has a smocked top (that area is dedicated to Frances Hodgson Burnett and her book The Secret Garden). There's also a Welsh miner, and a swimmer and a reader, and others.
All this, and I haven't even mentioned the kitchen, or the beautiful back garden, or the Rachel Carson area under the stairs - and there is far more!
Françoise and Pierre have plans for the house - I really hope they manage to achieve them!
No comments:
Post a Comment