Dunbar was probably introduced by her friend Da Bracher to Vita Sackville-West, châtelaine of Sissinghurst Castle, Kent, in the mid 1950s. Sackville-West, a prominent gardener as well known for her verse and novels as for her writings about horticulture, developed the gardens at Sissinghurst with her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson, to the point where they became, and remain, famous for their splendour, variety and imaginative presentation. In 1958 or 59 Dunbar was invited to Sissinghurst with a view to painting the gardens, in particular the White Garden, famous for its abundance of white roses. Dunbar found a wide variety of subjects for her brush. Her practice was to make detailed sketches of her subject, drawn from several angles, and to annotate her sketches with notes about shades of colour should she eventually work her sketch up into oils in her studio near Wye, Kent. Typical of Dunbar’s approach was to find something a little unusual, a little out of the ordinary, to commit to paper. In this case she has chosen a gardener’s handcart, probably dating from Victorian or Edwardian times, which Sackville-West’s gardeners have laden – indeed, overladen – with what appear to be geraniums or pelargoniums, pot-grown over the winter in heated greenhouses, for bedding out en masse in the spring.

What finished work resulted from Dunbar’s visits to Sissinghurst is not known. She died in May 1960, apparently without having completed any of the work she had envisaged. ‘Handcaft with Bedding-out Plants’ may be the only relic of what promised to be an exceptionally fruitful initiative. It became one of the hundreds of drawings collected over her lifetime that her husband Roger Folley packed into portfolios after her death and assigned to Alec, the younger of Dunbar’s two brothers. On Alec’s death the collection passed to his son Alasdair, Dunbar’s nephew, who stored them for many years in his house – which incorporated an oast house – in Biddenden, coincidentally hardly a stone’s throw from Sissinghurst. On Alasdair Dunbar’s death in 2012 or 2013 the collection was retrieved from the oast house and eventually presented to the public.

 Da Bracher, as it happened (don’t know what ‘Da’ was short for; a formidable lady), was coincidentally prominent in the Maidstone firm of solicitors who drew up the agreement between Paul and Ro Dunbar. I went with Evelyn to Sissinghurst once or twice in the late 1950s, meeting V.Sackville-West, then quite elderly, and her husband (if that’s the right term for their relationship), asleep in the garden, chin resting on his hands clasped on the handle of his walking stick. I mention it very briefly on p. 37 of my Evelyn Dunbar: A Life in Painting.