Norah Lindsay

Norah Lindsay (née Bourke) (26 April 1873 – 20 June 1948) was a socialite garden designer who between the World wars became a major influence on garden design and planting in the United Kingdom and on the Continent.

Norah Mary Madeline Bourke was born at the hill station of Ootacamund, India into an Anglo-Irish upper class military family, the niece of the 6th Earl of Mayo, the Governor-General and Viceroy of India. At the age of 22 she married the brother of Violet Lindsay Manners, Sir Harry Lindsay and went to live at her wedding gift, Sutton Courtenay Manor, Oxfordshire, actually an assemblage of charming and picturesque houses and cottages, fine barns and stables, where she developed her skills as a gardener. Influenced by Gertrude Jekyll she created the noted garden at the house, with an inspired kind of untidiness that influenced her lifelong friend Vita Sackville-West's love of self-seeded surprise effects within a formal structure at Sissinghurst and that may be detected today in the garden style of Rosemary Verey. The writings of Gertrude Jekyll and the early champion of wild gardens William Robinson, she had no formal botanical training, but a highly developed 'garden sense' that was in part the inheritance of her class. In 1924 after the collapse of her marriage and facing financial ruin she embarked on a career as a garden designer. Lindsay spent her entire life socialising with the upper echelons of society this led to many commissions from a client base which included royalty, English nobility and American expatriates.

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