I had intended to end the lack of recent posts once I’d settled nicely into 2016. But the tiniest of tangential Victorian Kitchen Garden trivia references has spurred me into action (sort of).
In the documentary on BBC Two about Fry’s career, ‘A Life on Screen - Stephen Fry’, at about 40 minutes in there are a pair of (extremely) short film clips of the late Dowager Duchess of Devonshire (you’ll need to watch it to find out why). I’m guessing that the clips date to the 1980’s and in them she’s walking in the grounds of her home, Chatsworth House, accompanied by a back and white collie dog.
However, what’s more interesting to a VKG nerd like me is the fact she is also accompanied by the Chatsworth head gardener, Dennis Hopkins.
Dennis appears a few times in VKG: in the section also featuring Sarah, the Chatsworth cook, and Vic, one of Dennis’s gardeners; and again thinning bunches of grapes in the Chatsworth vinery.
It’s just a low-res ‘scrape’ from the BBC’s iPlayer but in the shot here, not only is there the Duchess, Dennis and the collie, but also a glimpse of Joseph Paxton’s ‘Conservation Wall’, in the left-background. Pure VKG trivia or what?