The Fête Champêtre party, thrown in 1937 by the polymathic photographer Cecil Beaton and held at Ashcombe House in Wiltshire, was less a garden soirée than a piece of horticultural theatre: carriages overflowed with bundles of meadowsweet, studios were draped in swags of roses, waiters wore animal masks, and tables were dressed to resemble ballerinas. Ever the consummate showman, Beaton changed costumes four times – appearing as a 17th-century dandy, a brothel madame clad in pink satin, and in a frock coat adorned with chiffon flowers and broken eggshells, complemented by a surrealist mask gifted by Salvador Dalí.

As the party wound up and the first fragments of light broke on Ashcombe’s lawn with cockcrow, the photographer reflected on the spectacle of his all-night production:

We ate breakfast, drank hot drinks and enjoyed the spectacle confronting us of the garlanded house, the ilex trees with bird-cages hanging from their dark moss-green branches in the light of the early morning sun. The windows of the orangery, still lit from within, displayed a world of artificially bright colours. I felt that, as ever, Ashcombe had played up to the occasion.

The fête may have epitomised the heady exuberance of the Bright Young Things, the aesthetic group comprised of socialites notorious for carousing from party to party in the 1920s and 1930s, but it also underscored Beaton’s role as the set’s lodestar and Ashcombe as its stage.

Of all his loves – from the art collector Peter Watson and socialite Doris Delevingne to the actress Greta Garbo – none rivalled Beaton’s devotion to Ashcombe, a large, historic estate of 1,134 acres of rolling chalk downland on Cranborne Chase. He had transformed Ashcombe into his own Arcadia and playground for many artists, actors and friends. ‘Some people grow to love their homes; my reaction was instantaneous. It was love at first sight,’ he once declared. Gardens, first at Ashcombe and later at Reddish House, were integral to his identity, providing a continual source of beauty and theatricality. Beaton’s fascination with flowers is now the subject of a new exhibition, Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party, at the Garden Museum in Lambeth, London – the first exhibition dedicated exclusively to exploring horticulture’s impact on his artistry, featuring his personal diaries, photographs of friends and family, and sketches of costumes he designed.

Born in Hampstead in 1904 to Ernest Beaton, a prosperous timber merchant and Esther Sisson, Beaton had a comfortable, middle-class upbringing. He was introduced to photography by his nanny, who taught him how to use a Kodak Box Brownie at the age of 11. In the exhibition, vitrines of archival photography from this formative period are backdropped by cellophane and kitchen foil – the makeshift backdrops Beaton once used in his early photographs, including ones of his sister Baba and other debutantes to create reflective, sparkling backgrounds.

Much like his contemporary Evelyn Waugh, who shared his middle-class Hampstead upbringing, Beaton was eager to escape the sepia tones of his background, aspiring instead to be among the gilded and glittering. Waugh and Beaton had a fraught friendship; Waugh had bullied Beaton at their prep school in Hampstead, subjecting him to acts of torment such as turning his arms back to front and spitting peas at his face. Beaton later described Waugh as a ‘very sinister character’ with Waugh retaliating that he thought Beaton an ‘insensitive lout’. The pair pretended to be cordial as they moved into adulthood, due to overlapping social circles and class ambitions, with Beaton gravitating toward artistic and literary circles, such as the Sitwell’s, with Waugh more interested in rubbing shoulders with aristocratic and military elites.

However, whether they liked it or not, this peripheral status allowed them to be both active participants and acute observers of the classes above them. Photography – like writing for Waugh – was their passport to entering the seductive world of the aristocracy, allowing them to navigate high society on their own terms.

Beaton attended St John’s College, Cambridge, but having never shown a particular talent for academia, concentrated his efforts on the university’s amateur theatrical productions. While he may have left university in 1925 without a degree, he was quickly introduced by his friend Allanah Harper to the Bright Young Things circle, including to the poet Edith Sitwell, whom he would go on to photograph extensively. Soon enough, Beaton was their unofficial photographer and one of their leading lights.

After Vogue published his photographs of a production of The Duchess of Malfi, Beaton’s reputation soared, leading to a long-standing relationship with the magazine, which saw him contribute fashion and war photography alongside illustrations and articles until 1979, a year before his death.

When his lease at Ashcombe House terminated in 1945, Beaton was left devastated. However, he quickly discovered a new Eden at Reddish House, an early 18th-century manor with nearly six acres of landscaped gardens in the picturesque village of Broad Chalke. He immediately set about improving the property, even buying the water meadows in front of the house to create a water garden, ‘with a little private trout stream and a lake with an island, for all my own benefit’. A large cutting garden and a flower room were also built, filled with vases and wicker baskets for transporting flowers between photoshoots.

His gardens at Ashcombe and Reddish significantly influenced his career as a royal photographer, allowing him to shape a softer, more approachable image of the monarchy. Beaton would fill the space between the backdrop and the sitter with cascading bouquets of roses, carnations, and hydrangeas to convey a romantic, fairytale-like pastoral scene. Notably featured in Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party are his 1939 photograph of Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother), inspired by Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s ‘The Swing’, and a 1945 portrait of the then-Princess Elizabeth, seated amid a similar floral display at Windsor Castle.

From high-society portraiture to set designs, the exhibition excels in highlighting Beaton’s versatility and range as an artist. Opposite the royal portraits hang his set designs for Puccini’s Turandot, heavily influenced by his time spent in China during the Second World War. While serving as an official war photographer for the British Ministry of Information, he became fascinated by China’s bamboo gardens. This would later inspire the floral forms, colours and materials he used for the set design and costumes for the highly acclaimed production of Turandot  at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1961.

The production for which the photographer would receive the greatest praise would be My Fair Lady, both the Broadway hit and the 1964 film starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison, which earned him two Academy Awards. A letter from Hepburn congratulating Beaton is displayed at the exhibit alongside his costume designs, executed in confident strides of pen, ink, and gouache. The film’s more than 150 costumes, including Eliza Doolittle’s transformation from soot-stained flower-seller to society belle in an ostrich-feathered hat at Ascot, remain as timeless as ever. It was a masterclass in narrative design.

Still, even amid the glittering success of My Fair Lady, Beaton was always pining after his garden. Writing to his assistant in March 1956, just four days before the musical was to open on Broadway, he asked: ‘Will you find out if I can have a mimosa tree or two? For the winter garden – as even when not flowering the leaves are so exquisite.’

This winter garden at Reddish House was a source of great pride for the designer. The exhibition poster for Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party  is a self-portrait of Beaton sitting in a wicker peacock chair at the back of this beloved garden. He sits upright, leg across knee, a pug wedged between his hands. The floor features black-and-white tiles and a Moorish pond formed in the shape of a quatrefoil. There is bamboo panelling and a bamboo trellis suspended from the ceiling to support the climbing plants – no doubt also inspired by his time in China.

In light of Beaton’s polymathic qualities, the exhibition is disappointingly limited in scope and size. Curated by Garden Museum curator Emma House and designed by artist Luke Edward Hall, they hoped visitors would feel ‘transported to Wiltshire upon entering’, but the dimly lit exhibition space feels more akin to a cramped wunderkabinett. The poor lighting swallows up Beaton’s works and designs – it feels a disservice to their intricacy and ineffable glamour.

Flowers, of course, serve as the thematic anchor of the exhibit, but there is a noticeable lack of chronological or narrative coherence, leaving you feeling somewhat adrift as to how to navigate the space. Moreover, the use of artificial, garish flowers that climb the walls of the space felt at odds with Beaton’s reverence for beauty, elegance and style par excellence.

Still, with a major retrospective opening at the National Portrait Gallery this autumn, Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party feels like a fitting prelude. It foregrounds the enduring role of flowers in his life and how they cross-pollinated their way into his designs, photography, and creative imagination. ‘My garden is the greatest joy of my life, after my friends,’ Beaton declared a year before his death in 1980. ‘Both are worth living for.’

Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party will be on display at London’s Garden Museum until 21 September 2025.