Family Pleasures

Life at Fritham Lodge seems to have been very pleasant while Edmund, Jessie and their family lived there. The surrounding forest land provides many types of recreation including riding, shooting and the entertainments provided by local traditions. A regular cricket match seems to have been supported by the Heathcote families: Edmund and Major Eustace Heathcote, Edmund's younger brother, who lived nearby at Penn. Entries in Edmund's diary show that they had bought cricket equipment and a full croquet set in April and May 1867. A cricket match, one of several recorded in the diary, took place at Fritham on the 25th of August 1870 which cost them two shillings and sixpence and on the 30th of August the same year they made a subscription to the Bramshaw flower show.
It was, perhaps, Jessie who was the most interested in gardening but Edmund's diary has several entries about seeds from Sutton and Sons of Reading - an example being 3rd July 1867: seeds for £2-18-3. That would be a lot of seeds. In November the same year they bought 300 Crocus bulbs, two dozen Tulips and one dozen Ercomonia. The kitchen garden was not forgotten: peasticks and canes were bought and an array of gardening tools. The garden was provided with regular supplies of manure at three shillings a heap. A diary entry in April 1867 had Richard Hillys turning the manure heap, three and a half days for six shillings.

Edmund's plan for the garden included growing plants under glass. There are two sketches of greenhouses shown in the diary. Both designs seem to suggest they were intended to be attached to the house or a wall. Edmund may have planned to build them himself but no traces of greenhouses are left now and nothing about their costs is in the diary.

 		  

 
 

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