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Henrietta Phipps, landscape gardener – obituary
Henrietta Phipps, who has died aged 84, was a landscape gardener for Kensington and Chelsea Council who shaped the look of the royal borough; the daughter of the artist, Henry Lamb, and the writer, Lady Pansy Pakenham, she figured prominently in her father’s pictures and did much to promote his works.
The oldest of three, Henrietta Frances Lamb was born at Paddington on December 9 1931. Her father was 21 years her mother’s senior, but the marriage was a happy one, spent at Coombe Bissett, south of Salisbury.
Henrietta was brought up in the heart of the literary set of her mother, the older sister of Lord Longford, the prison reformer. Among her mother’s friends were Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman, who described a typical family scene: “O the calm of Coombe Bissett is tranquil and deep, / Where Ebble flows soft in her downland asleep; / There beauty to me came a-pushing a pram / In the shape of the sweet Pansy Felicia Lamb.”
Henrietta was surrounded by her father’s artistic friends. The National Portrait Gallery has a photograph of a five-year-old Henrietta dancing around with a parasol. The picture was taken by Lady Ottoline Morrell, the literary hostess and patron of the arts.
Tate Britain owns an entrancing Henry Lamb – The Artist’s Family, painted in 1940 – in which Henrietta, now eight, steals the picture again, with her bright gaze and wide, humorous mouth.
Henrietta Lamb was the most bookish of a bookish family. Pansy once wrote to her sister-in-law, Elizabeth Pakenham, in a letter inviting her daughter, Antonia Pakenham (later Fraser), to stay: “Henrietta is perfect with one exception: she will spend two hours in the bath reading John Buchan.”
By the time the young Antonia Pakenham arrived at Coombe Bissett, Henrietta, barely a teenager, had devoured Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. She directed Antonia to the juicy passages, especially the bit where Fabrice suggests coming up to Linda’s bedroom in the middle of the night and Linda says: “I must say it would be very nice” – which became a catchphrase between the two girls when they went off to the Godolphin School, Salisbury.
By the time Henrietta Lamb got to Somerville College, Oxford, she had become a Roman Catholic. It was a bold step – her father was not just an atheist but an argumentative atheist.
After Oxford, Henrietta Lamb worked for the writer Peter Quennell at History Today. She shared a basement flat in the Pakenhams’ house, 14 Cheyne Gardens, with Antonia, then working for Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
The “Basement Years” saw a procession of young men trooping up and down the area steps. The two girls could not afford the strong drink demanded by their raffish escorts. So Henrietta devised the “Whisky Solution”. This involved fishing an empty bottle of Haig out of the dustbin, then pouring into it the contents of a Haig miniature – just enough for one decent glass for the swain, after which Henrietta would utter a cry of surprise: “What’s this? I can’t believe it, the whisky’s finished.”
Henrietta Phipps inherited some of her father’s skills but, perhaps overawed by his shadow, turned to landscape gardening for Kensington and Chelsea Council. Among her works was the landscaping for the Kensington New Pool at Notting Hill, along with many another civic amenities.
She was the mainstay of the Ladbroke Square Gardens Committee, which looked after one of London’s biggest private garden squares.
Henrietta Phipps was also instrumental in preserving her father’s legacy: lending works to exhibitions, advising art historians and generously giving pictures to family members.
In 1960, she married the silversmith, William Phipps, son of Sir Eric Phipps, Britain’s ambassador in Berlin between 1933 and 1937. Hitler presented a rose tree to celebrate William’s birth, and William, a joker, sometimes claimed that the Führer had dandled him on his knee.
William and Henrietta Phipps met when Henry Lamb painted Sir Eric. They were rarely far from each other’s side until his death in 2009. Their daughter and three sons survive her.
Henrietta Phipps, born December 9 1931, died May 27 2016