Collingwood Ingram 1880-1981

 

Collingwood Ingram’s life spanned 100 years. He was brought up in privilege and benefited from family money all his life. He made full use of his good fortune, devoting much of his first forty years to the study of birds and the last sixty to the collection, breeding and growing of garden plants, especially Japanese cherries. In both ornithology and horticulture he was amongst the finest in the country. As well as loving the beauty of natural world, he also shot and hunted, a combination quite common in his time.

 

In his teens Collingwood Ingram kept diaries, illustrated with sketches.

As an adult he travelled widely and recorded his travels in journals and sketchbooks.

These legacies of his enjoyment of nature  are at the core of this website.

 

 

War Diaries

 

"Wings over the Western Front"

 

In June 2014 Collingwood Ingram's WW1 diaries were published by

Day Books of Charlbury 

  From late 1916 until the end of the war in November 1918, Collingwood Ingram was a Compass Officer in the Royal Flying Corps. He was also at the height of his powers as an ornithologist and even the war did not dim his passion for birds. His diaries describe the devastation of the battlefields and also take us behind the lines, where ordinary life continued and birds  sang. We see the birds and the countryside of NE France through his words and sketchbooks, He also applies the same descriptive powers to the early days of flight

and to the ever-present war.

 

"ultimately records the triumph

of nature over warfare"

see review in link below.

 

Wings over the Western Front

 

Day Books

 

........................................................

 

 

A fine biography

 

'Cherry Ingram -- The Englishman who saved Japan's Blossoms'

 

by Naoko Abe

 

Published by Chatto & Windus on 21 March 2019

 

(and in the USA by Knopf Doubleday as The Sakura Obsession)

 

The original  Japanese version won the Nihon Essayist Club Award, a major non-fiction award.

Summaries of the chapters in English can be read on the author's website.

 Naoko Abe

The book describes the place of flowering cherries in the history

and culture of Japan and Cherry Ingram's key role in the survival of the old village varieties,

including the rescue from extinction of the great white cherry Tai Haku

Tai Haku

 

 

BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week 18th - 22nd  March 2019

 

 

-------------------------

 

Just published!

 

A Cherry Season in Japan - the Travel Journal of Collingwood Ingram

 

 

Collingwood Ingram's complete journal of his 1926 cherry 'pilgrimage' to Japan is now published in six episodes in Shakkei, the Journal of the Japanese Garden Society. Collingwood's journal, edited, with commentary, by the Japanese  cherry authority and landscape architect Professor Wybe Kuitert and the keeper of Collingwood Ingram's archive Ernie Pollard.

 

The journal includes contemporary photographs taken by

Collingwood on his travels around Japan and has many other illustrations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seisaku Funatsu, the eminent cherry enthusiast on the occasion of his meeting with Collingwood Ingram in Japan in 1926. Photograph by Collingwood.


 

 

 

 

And a new book proposal !

 

 

Cherry Ingram: an Illustrated Life

 

click to see the proposal

 

 

Contact website creator at ernie@pollardweb.com