This is Benton End today, where the garden is coming back to life under the management of James Horner, the new head gardener. This Guardian article evokes the magic of the place where, as writer Ronald Blythe said, “All of us flowered...it was three guineas a week, bring your own sheets.”

This week we have Cedric Morris (1889-1982), artist and plantsman. The good news is that Benton End, the house and gardens in Suffolk which was his home with his partner Arthur Lett-Haines from 1939, is now in the care of the Garden Museum which is preparing to reopen it. Here they established the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing and attracted a wide range of influential artists, writers, musicians and gardeners. This is Morris' glorious 'Flowers' (1940, Newport Museum and Gallery).

Fang Zhaoling also studied landscape painting with Chinese masters, and developed a style which is distinctly her own. At various times in her life she lived in the UK and travelled extensively in Europe, drawing inspiration from the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Lake District and the Highlands of Scotland. This is 'Lake District Landscape of England' (1979), a radically different interpretation of a familiar view.

The Ashmolean Museum, which has one of the finest collections of modern Chinese art outside China, held a centenary exhibition of Fang Zhaoling's work in 2014 (she studied at Oxford from 1956 to 1958). It included this delightful work, Vegetables (1958), which is in the Ashmolean collection. The catalogue is still available at the exceptionally low price of £2.

Plum blossom (above) is the national flower of China. Fang Zhaoling celebrates the arrival of spring and blossom's timeless beauty in a series of works; she was way ahead of the better-known recent paintings by David Hockney and Damien Hirst. 

Fang Zhaoling often made series of paintings of a single subject. Stonehenge was a favourite, perhaps because the standing stones suit her modern interpretation of traditional Chinese ink calligraphy. The characters in this scroll explain that the image was painted to celebrate the royal wedding in 1981. The inscription reads, "Picture of Stonehenge, 10,000 years of stability. I use this to convey my wishes to the heir of the British throne on his auspicious wedding day. Fang Zhaoling at the British capital, 1981." The side inscription adds, "I feel joyful after painting this."

After a visit to Hong Kong, this week we have paintings by Fang Zhaoling (方召麐1914-2006). Born in Wuzi, Jiangsu province, she was one of the most prolific modern female Chinese artists of the twentieth century. She moved to Hong Kong in 1950 where she studied with several masters, and developed her own distinctive style, as shown here in her painting of peonies. Her work can be seen in the British Museum and the V&A held a retrospective exhibition in 1994.