It was 1934 when the magazine editor, poet and socialist Douglas Garman introduced American art collector Peggy Guggenheim to the charms of rural Sussex, during a trip to his mother’s cottage in South Harting. Having met in London a year before, where Peggy was living with the writer and critic John Ferrar Holms, the pair eventually embarked on an affair. Following a summer in Hampshire, Peggy bought Yew Tree Cottage, a Sussex woodland home near Petersfield. ‘My life there was so domestic. In the early spring the forests were filled with wild garlic… the children [Pegeen and Sindbad] loved to find bird nests, and we had the heavenly cry of the cuckoo,’ she recalled.
