As the days grow shorter, nice to be reminded by this beautiful photograph by 'Reggie' here that spring will arrive next year and the Newnham garden will be looking like this.

And the ivy, more properly virginia creeper, about to turn red, nicely timed to welcome the new undergraduates each year. When, fifteen years ago, we had the three Persephone 'Newnham Weekends' (a hundred of us stayed overnight and there was a programme of speakers and events) it was September each time and the creeper was not yet its glorious October red. The weekends were nevertheless rather magical! Is there anyone reading this Post who was there? We are hoping to have something rather similar in Bath. One day.

One of the writers we publish next week, Flora Mayor (1872-1932) was at Newnham and wrote hundreds of letters home about her life there; one day these will make a delightful book. Nowadays, the gardens may be slightly more elaborately cultivated but the atmosphere is not so different from that of the early 1890s. However, the garden would have been neater then: the planting wouldn't have been allowed to ramble in this beautiful way. 

When the first Newnham buildings were built (Old Hall was completed in 1875) the gardens were not part of the plan. But 'in 1892, the Chair of the Garden Committee, Blanche Athena Clough, decided to start planning the College gardens. The College engaged James Backhouse & Son of York to draw up a plan for the gardens (Plan 1 here). The gardens did not follow the Backhouse plan exactly, or any of other plans that were commissioned subsequently; like the buildings, they just grew. The Founders were too busy with the welfare of their clients, women wanting accommodation and education, to worry particularly about the gardens. Although from the beginning the gardens were a core feature of Newnham life – there was to be no theory of quadrangles or grandeur for Newnham. Strict practicality was the watchword. The first Principal, Miss Anne Jemima Clough, declared that ‘students must have fresh air, exercise, and wholesome food’ but the garden could take care of itself. An orchard was planted, pigs, and chickens were kept, and tennis courts proliferated round the steadily increasing number of buildings.'

So there have been various stresses at Persephone Books recently, one or two have been detailed on our Instagram posts, most of them  are now resolved, and we are looking forward to our first event in the upstairs room on Friday (Elizabeth Day in discussion about They Were Sisters, a few tickets still available). Last week we were briefly in Cambridge, and the definite highlight of the day was the new Newnham garden, new because it isn't formal any more but ravishingly beautiful and wild. This sunflower bed also has courgettes and marrows and brussel sprouts!  So the Post this week will be devoted, soothingly, to pictures of Newnham garden.

It has been very interesting exploring contemporary war artists. Nevertheless there is no one nowadays to match Anna Airey or Ardizzone or, heartrendingly, Rex Whistler (it's particularly poignant and upsetting when someone is killed in the last days of a war). Here is the famous self-portrait, it's May 1940 and he is wearing his Welsh Guards uniform. Once more we salute the incomparable Rex.

'In Roderick Buchanan’s Scots Irish/Irish Scots the installation explores the conflicting allegiances and identities of Northern Irish history by depicting two ideologically opposed flute bands parading within the same city. To make matters even more complex, the bands aren’t even Northern Irish themselves, but hail from Buchanan’s hometown of Glasgow, with its own, deeply entrenched cultural divisions. On the one screen, then, dressed in imperial red, are the Black Skull Corps of Fife and Drum, performing as part of the city’s Loyalist festivities commemorating the 1689 Siege of Londonderry. On the other, clad in more sombrely imposing black, march the Parkland Republican Flute Band, on the anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising – a more subdued affair, with fewer followers, which culminates in a windswept cemetery and a litany of Republican martyrs. Parallel scenes play concurrently. and you end up with a sense of acute, perpetual conflict: not only between sectarian factions, but also within individuals themselves – between their rigidly performed, culturally circumscribed roles, and their more ambiguous, complex shades of humanity. Magnificent.' Time Out here