LADY COVENTRY'S NEEDLEWORK 



This is a pretty Midland name for the good garden plant commonly 

 called Red Valerian, or Spur Valerian {Centranthus ruber), that groups so 

 well in the picture with the straw-thatched beehives. How the name 

 originated cannot be exactly stated, but may easily be inferred. There 

 are several estates in the Midland Counties belonging to the Coventry 

 family, and, bearing in mind what we know of the home life of our great- 

 great-grandmothers of the late eighteenth century, it may be assumed 

 that some Lady Coventry of that date was specially fond of the pretty 

 needlecraft so widely practised among the ladies of that time. 



Delightful things they are, these old needlework pictures, with a 

 character quite different from that of their predecessors of Jacobean times. 

 These were much stifFer in treatment and usually had figures ; a lady and 

 gentleman and a dog being usual subjects, and trees looking like those 

 out of a Noah's Ark, no doubt interpretations of the stiffly-cut yew and 

 box trees of the gardens of the same times. 



But the workers of the flower-pictures of a hundred years later, and 

 into the first quarter of the nineteenth century, for the most part chose 

 flowers alone for their subjects. Sometimes a drawing was made, but 

 many of them look as if they were worked direct from the flowers. It 

 would appear that the worker would begin in the spring, with a 

 Hyacinth ; then would come Anemones, Tulips, Auriculas, Lilac, Roses 

 and Lilies ; a jumble of seasons but a concord of pretty things, and all 

 done with a simplicity, a sweetness, a directness of intention and absence 

 of strain or affectation, that give them a singular charm. One such 

 picture that I have before me must have been begun in May, and 



129 R 



