The Arts & Crafts Movement. Oscar Lovell Triggs

his manual work in the garden was almost limited to clipping yew hedges. But of flowers and vegetables and fruit trees he knew all the ways and capabilities. Red House garden, with its long grass walks, its midsummer lilies and autumn sunflowers, its wattled rose-trellises inclosing richly flowered square garden plots, was then as unique as the house it surrounded. The building had been planned with such care that hardly a tree in the orchard had to be cut down; apples fell in at the windows as they stood open on hot autumn nights.”

      Into this house the Morrises moved during the summer of 1860, and after two years of residence the house was practically completed. “The garden, skilfully laid out amid the old orchard, had developed its full beauty, and the adornment of the house kept growing into greater and greater elaboration. A scheme had been designed for the mural decoration of the hall, staircase, and drawing room, upon various parts of which work went on intermittently for several years. The walls of the spacious and finely proportioned staircase were to be completely covered with paintings in tempera of scenes from the War of Troy, to be designed and executed by Burne-Jones. Below them on a large wall space in the hall was to be a great ship carrying the Greek heroes. It was designed, as the rest of the Troy series were also to have been, in a frankly medieval spirit; a warship indeed of the fourteenth century, with the shields of the kings hung over the bulwarks.