Flowers

When the 15-year-old Maggi Hambling arrived at Benton End in Hadleigh, Suffolk – home of the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing – with two paintings to show the school’s founders, Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, she was ushered into the dining room where Morris was having dinner. He made some criticisms but was very encouraging, then Lett-Haines came in and made the opposite criticisms but was encouraging too. As teachers, both believed in bringing out a student’s native talent – but as artists and characters, says Hambling: ‘They were polar opposites.’ ‘Every time I paint a portrait, I lose a friend,’ Morris regretted One aim of this new

Hermitage, where the heel of Roxburghshire kicks into the once-lawless Debatable Lands, seems an unlikely place to find a botanical artist. It’s hard to make anything grow here, let alone an exhibition-load of rare and sometimes exotic plants. Lorded over by Hermitage Castle, a menacing hulk of medieval brutalism described by George MacDonald Fraser as ‘shouting “sod off” in stone’, this is a remote, rarely visited stretch of the border. Once the playground of reivers, and the graveyard of their victims, today it’s a land of sheep farming, forestry plantations and cruel May frosts. But there, hunkered against the wind in the foot of the Hermitage valley, is the studio