Gathering Up the Sun: the Cotehele Christmas Flower Garland
Commoners' Advent, day 24
I want to begin this week’s Commoners’ Advent sharings with a tiny piece of magic that I have only recently discovered; the Cotehele House Christmas Flower Garland. This isn’t an old tradition, but it is both a beautiful and a meaningful one and a reminder that we too can weave a thread of enchantment into the fabric of our Midwinter journey.
Cotehele, or in Cornish ‘Kosheyl’, is a medieval house with Tudor additions, in Calstock, on the River Tamar in Cornwall. It was built by the Edgecumbe family in 1485, after Sir Richard Edgecumbe was gifted with money and land after fighting for Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth. Whatever we might think about land being gifted to the rich, it is a beautiful house and remains one of the least altered Tudor houses in the British Isles.
It features a particularly lovely and well preserved stone dovecote. There are two delightful things about this from my perspective; one that it led me to ‘The Pigeon Cote: A,O.Cooke on the Dovecots of Old England, Wales, and Scotland’, which I will now doubtless spend many happy hours exploring. I love pigeons, and I love things that pigeons love! You can read about how wonderful pigeons are here if you’d like to.
The other delightful thing is that the Cotehele dovecote is next to a ‘stew pond’, which I have now learned is a pond used to keep fish for the kitchens of monasteries and manor houses. Interestingly, the medieval brothels and bath houses of Southwark in South London were also known as ‘stews’, or ‘stewhouses’, possibly because the stew ponds where the Bishop of Winchester bred fish were located nearby.1 This, of course, leads us back to my beloved Crossbones Graveyard, which I wrote about on day 7 of Commoners’ Advent.
Cotehele also has a small woodland chapel dedicated to St George, who in in several cultures (notably Eastern Europe and in the Middle East) is a ‘Green Man’ figure, and St Thomas Beckett, who is the patron saint of our Advent Church of the Shepherd and the Shrew! It feels to me that, under the surface of the everyday and the centuries of land ownership, Cotehele must be the most wild spirited of places. I love to follow these threads of connection; a reminder that we are always held enspelled in a wild web of relationship.
Back to Cotehele House and the Christmas flower garland! The creation of the 60ft long decoration only began in the 1950s but has become a great favourite with visitors from miles around each Christmastide. Each bloom comes from Cotehele’s cut flower garden and the aim is to place 30,000 flowers individually each year. This year the garland contains about 26,000 following a challenging growing year. The seeds are sown in February, the flowers cut in the summer, and they are then hung in the potting shed to dry until the Autumn before being woven into the garland; a process which takes the equivalent of 1,800 hours over the year.
In early November a thin rope about the thickness of a thumb is laid out and bunches of evergreens are attached before being hoisted up to the ceiling and hung in swags in Cotehele’s Great Hall. The flowers are then retrieved from the potting shed, cut, sorted, and placed individually amongst the green, with up to 800 per day being carefully added. Writer, Tish Farrell says that the garland makes the hall it’s hung in smell faintly of summer hay.
The garland will look different each year, depending which blooms have been grown and which have thrived. and is on display from late November until Twelfth Night each year.
You can see drone footage of this year’s garland here.
Here are images of the 2009 garland.
Here is the garland being made in 2016. I think that this one might be my favourite.
2017;
You can see a whalebone arch around the doorway in the first photo. More about that here.
And here is the 2018 garland;
In 2020, in the midst of lockdown restrictions, it was decided to make an outdoor ‘tribute’ to the garland by placing the 2,000 flowers it had been possible to grow that year outside in the archway of the hall court for visitors to enjoy, ensuring the the tradition has been unbroken since 1956.
And, in 2021, which again was effected by lockdown restrictions, it was decided to make a copy of a garland from 1980s, which had fewer flowers but beautiful swathes of greenery, echoing more closely the greenery and kissing boughs that our Tudor ancestors brought into their homes in the winter.
And here is this year’s Christmas flower garland;
This is such a beautiful tradition, and a continuation of the wisdom of our ancestors in gathering up the sunbeams of summer and bringing them into the winter house in the form of evergreens, and now dried flowers. Hope that life will return again as the frozen fallows catch fire in the spring.
#CommonersAdvent #OldAdvent #CelticAdvent #StMartinsLent #WinterLent
I am determined to continue offering my work free of charge, because that too is resistance, but if you would ever like to support me with pennies you can do that at https://ko-fi.com/radicalhoneybee. Thank you so much, both for pennies and for all other forms of support, all of which are worth more than their weight in gold.
References:
On Cotehele ~
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotehele
Visit Cotehele and here for visiting times and info
Visit Cotehele, with schedule for garland making
Tribute to Cornish National Trust Cotehele's traditional Christmas garland, Your Devon and Cornwall Wedding, 2020
National Trust Cotehele marks 65 years of Christmas garland, BBC News, November 2021
Flowers being harvested and prepared for this year's 60ft traditional Christmas Garland at Cotehele, Cornish Times, September 2024
Last dried flower added to this year’s Christmas flower garland at Cotehele, Cornish Times, November 2024 ~includes drone footage of this year’s garland
Cotehele's flower garland back for Christmas, BBC News, November 2024, includes an interview with head gardener, David Bouch
Prostitution in early modern England, Wikipedia
This flower garland is so gorgeous. Why is it that even people who would make something so beautiful might also despise the wonderful pigeon? I recently had ‘words’ with an acquaintance who makes beautiful things but who despises “the hateful grey squirrel” and I marvel really at the ability of humans to separate things, to dissociate from certain types of beauty and not others? It’s fascinating really but also sad.
I admire pigeons (and grey squirrels), I’ve learned from your article things I didn’t know and like you;
“Often, on a day when I might have fallen through the cracks in my own heart, they have saved me with their relentless tenacity of being and their irridescent beauty”
With ongoing gratitude and always looking forward to your next piece of writing.
The chapel is so sweet and what a gorgeous location sitting atop that little outcrop looking over the Tamar. I love the 2016 garland, it's stunning. Cothele is high on my bucket list as it also has fully intact servants quarters and kitchen which I am fascinated to see. Another fascinating read. Thank You