Regency roses

I’ve never paid particular attention to flowers in Jane Austen’s novels, but apparently, someone else has been taking note: Earlier this month, the English town of Alton—the nearest neighbor to the village of Chawton, where Austen spent the last eight years of her life—unveiled a new Austen-themed garden on its High Street.

And according to a press release from a local government council, the Austen garden is “a Regency-inspired planting scheme including flowers mentioned in her books and charity rose varieties that are named after her and her home in Chawton.” (Maybe some of these?)

The space also includes two picnic benches (scroll down for picture) designed to resemble the wheels of horse-drawn carriages, with tables and seating tucked inside circular arches. Judging from the pictures, these benches will be better suited to avoiding rain than to basking in sunshine, but given the usual state of the weather in England, this may be a prudent choice.

Like virtually every public project with an Austen theme, the Regency garden in Alton, which holds an annual Regency festival to celebrate its Austen ties, was partly inspired by the profit motive: “It’s sure to bring in Austen fans from around the world,” noted one local official.

For Janeites, however, the big news comes deep into the release, when a different local official reports that “the jewel in the crown of the new garden design” will be—wait for it—a Jane Austen statue, designed by sculptor Mark Coreth*, to be unveiled next summer, during the year-long celebration of the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth.

If you’re keeping score at home, the Alton bronze will bring to four the total number of Austen statues in the county of Hampshire, which is slightly larger than Rhode Island. Basingstoke led the way in 2017, with a bronze of Austen strolling through town, and a year later, Chawton erected a smaller version of Basingstoke’s statue. Most famously, Winchester Cathedral is in the process of putting up a controversial Austen statue of its own, having fought off opposition from people who feared it might bring in too many tourists.

Visiting all these recently minted tourist sites is going to make for an exhausting Janeite pilgrimage next year. It’s lucky there will be at least one place to stop and smell the roses.

* Coreth usually specializes in sculpting wildlife, so perhaps someone involved in the project took the famous line from Austen’s letter of May 24, 1813 (#85 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence)--“If I am a wild Beast, I cannot help it”--a bit too literally.