E. F. Benson and Lamb House, page three

Trees in Lamb House garden:       "When I first stayed with Henry James an ancient mulberry-tree stood on the lawn, but a gale split and rent it beyond repair, and now apart from the screen of poplars there are only four trees, three delectable, a walnut and two fine red hawthorns, and one detestable, a weeping ash.  This consists of a staight thick trunk some ten feet high, from the top of which radiates a drooping circle of innumerable canes, tapering as they descend to the ground.  In late spring they put forth their leaves, and the tree becomes more odious yet, for these form a stuffy tent or cave of thick foliage which from outside looks like the green crinoline of some goblin giantess." (from Final Edition by E.F. Benson, 1940, pp.145-46 in the 1988 Hogarth reprint)

Just after Easter in 1925:   "Arthur...would be going back to Cambridge for the May term.  He, too, now looked upon Lamb House as a home, and we had been adding to its amenities.  A Bechstein concert grand piano had been coaxed into the garden-room, curtains and carpets had been renewed and the central-heating was to be re-installed during his absence, via deep-laid trenches along the main garden path."

"I was glad to be my own master again...  For the next eight weeks of the Cambridge term the house would be mine, and after that I should see Rye no more till the October term took Arthur back to Cambridge again.  I meant to spend these weeks without pattern for the days.  . . .  My table in the garden-room was now piled with Hakluyt's Voyages, for, abandoning fiction, I was studying for a life of Francis Drake.  By this time I had a good many friends in Rye, and I would ask them in to dinner and bridge, or, if I chose, I would be solitary and work, and in the afternoon, if this heat-spell continued, I would take sun-baths in the garden or sea-baths on the shore, and I would ask a friend down to stay with me, and we would both do exactly what we pleased."   (Benson, pp. 186-188)

When  "Arthur had gone I pottered out into the garden and talked to Gabriel the gardener.  [I was told]  'That oak-tree of yours is making wood wonderful.  It'll be getting root-bound in its pot.  Better plant it out.  . . .'"

"The oak-tree requires a note.  Four years ago on a November afternoon I was standing very still and gazing up into an oak-tree by Playden church, because I thought I had seen a great spotted woodpecker fly into it...and an acorn fell from the tree and after hitting me in the face, dropped into my hand.  I clutched it and took it home.  There could be no doubt that it was meant for me in some occult and special sense, and I wrapped it up in a bit of wet moss, and laid it in Gabriel's greenhouse.  I told him what I meant to do with it and it took his fancy.  When it sprouted we planted it in a flower-pot.  It shot up, but crookedly, and Gabriel tied the infant stem to a stick and made it grow straight.  Buds broke out on the side of the stem, but we rubbed these off, and now this four-year-old tree, eighteen inches high, has a good thick woody trunk, and a crown of leaf-bearing twigs at the top.  It is a standard oak...  It is to be kept dwarfed in stature:  all twigs growing upwards are drastically cut back, also those that extend too far horizontally...  We turned it out of the flower-pot and planted it in a bed under the garden-room.  (Benson, pp.188-190)

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