Pioneer of the studied casual

Norah Lindsay had wit, beauty and a bohemian spirit. Diana Cooper described her dressing ‘mostly in tinsel and leopard skins and baroque pearls and emeralds’. At Sutton Courtenay, the house where she lived through the early years of her marriage to Harry Lindsay, she entertained non-stop. Raymond Asquith, Julian and Billy Grenfell, Maurice Baring and Jasper Ridley all flocked to her table from Oxford. ‘Sutton Courtenay, roses, the river and the youth of England splashing in the Thames and Norah, the sublime Norah,’ wrote Chips Channon. She was never out of love, often with several young men at a time. ‘Norah sometimes vexes me,’ wrote her sister Madeline Whitbread. ‘How can one thoroughly enjoy oneself and at the same time imagine oneself heartbroken and pining. But I cannot think you can be really heartbroken and be as joyous and gay and interested in heaps of men, clothes, going out, etc.’

Like all life-enhancers, Mrs Lindsay must have been exhausting to live with and when her marriage broke up she stayed on at the beautiful manor house by the Thames, where she continued to make a garden that was as talked about as her clothes and her lavish parties. The laissez-faire style she favoured in the borders was unusual at a time when bright and tidy flowers were more the thing. Her plants were allowed to spill and flop and she gardened on a generous scale. ‘Then here [spoken in a Somerset burr by a puzzled gardener] Mrs Lindsay wants lilies, lazily lolling’ is a joke that is still told at Mells. For her, a garden was, as Rousseau claimed, a mood. ‘Some gardens, like some people,’ she wrote, ‘have a charm to enslave and yet are as intangible as dew or vapour…’