There are some very curious things in the grounds of Kingston Lacy House in Dorset. A row of faintly ridiculous toy-like cannons sits atop the ha ha; a huge pharaonic sarcophagus in beautiful pink hued granite rests heavily and incongruously at the edge of the formal lawn. Continuing the Egyptian theme, the obelisk at the end of the avenue leading from the south front of the house is no mere garden ornament or folly; it comes from the temple of Philae.The Egyptian contributions to the garden were made by a former owner, William Bankes, intrepid explorer, early Egyptologist, distinguished classicist, eminent collector and part-time sodomite. I suppose one might say that Bankes was no stranger to inserting curiously inappropriate things in gardens: the poor fellow had to flee England in 1841 after being caught in flagrante delicto with a guardsman in Green Park. However, perhaps oddest of all the very odd garden features at Kingston Lacy is the quaintly charming Edwardian 'Japanese tea garden' and this was constructed by one Hermione Bankes (come to think of it, gentile ladies of the period probably didn’t actually construct things and rarely wielded spades or pickaxes so perhaps she simply requested it).
There is something more than a tad theatrical or operatic about the tea garden and one feels it owes rather more to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado or to Puccini's Madame Butterfly than to the Orient. It is all too easy to imagine Mrs. Bankes and other ladies of the house elaborately dressed as the more respectable sort of Geisha while they performed a highly decorous if somewhat improbable interpretation of the tea ceremony doubtless involving the very best Wedgwood Willow Pattern china, Earl Grey and wafer-thin slices of lemon. One hopes that the rules of their idiosyncratic version of the ancient Japanese tea ceremony were sufficiently civilized as to permit the serving of scones and cucumber sandwiches. However bizarrely inaccurate or simply silly Mrs. Bankes's Oriental theatricals may have been, they would have been a lot more interesting than Marie Antoinette’s inane posturings as a simple milkmaid at Versailles.
The Japanese Tea Garden is a pretty enough place and well worth a visit as is the rest of the estate. It does, however, prompt an unsettling thought. Do aristocratic Japanese ladies have exotic fantasies in which they dress as blousy British barmaids and serve warm pints of Theakston's Old Peculiar, crisps and pickled eggs?
