Mhm.

Please.

The play.

A life in bloom was inspired by the beautiful gardens created by the Bell family during their time at Mount Grace priory, and designed to be played there.

Gertrude Bell and her mother corresponded regularly throughout.

Gertrude's incredible career as a scholar, mountaineer, explorer, travel writer, translator, archaeologist, spy, and diplomat.

Gardens, Flowers, and the beauty of the natural and created world were a recurring theme and an inspiration to them both.

These extracts from the full version of the play tell us something of Gertrude's formative years and how she took her love of gardens from Mount Grace to the East.

It's a source of constant wonder to me how the simple act of planting can transform a wilderness into an oasis.

I remember my daughter Gertrude telling me that in the Persian language the word for garden is the same as the word for paradise.

I think that when we create a garden we do make ourselves a sort of earthly paradise.

To bring a measure of calm in the chaos.

My daughter Gertrude went into the wilderness so that she could be free to be herself.

Do forgive me.

I have not introduced myself.

I am Lady Florence, Bell wife too, sir Huebel, Mother to Gertrude Stepmother, if you wish to be precise.

People who have not met my daughter are always curious to know all about her.

I am under the strictest instructions from her too, avoid any communication with the press at all, and certainly do not provide them with any photographs.

My daughter can be insistent, and some might call it obstinacy even as a child.

She was independent, outspoken, sure of herself, and entirely without fear.

One time I remember running the garden hose down one of the laundry chimneys to put the fire out.

Mother was not best pleased when I responded to her remonstrations by throwing every hat I could find in the hall at her.

She must have despaired of me ever entering polite society.

When Gertrude was not outdoors, her head was always buried in a book.

Her passion for learning expressed itself frequently in the questions she asked her father such as why does the tide come in, or why is the sky blue to which her father always endeavored to provide a suitable and scientific answer.

Gertrude was a girl of spirit and initiative.

Willful, gifted, but also impatient of anything or anyone who inhibited her quest to know and experience everything however valuable the intellectual wears you may have to offer.

It is obvious that if your method of calling your fellow man's attention to them is to give him a slap in the face at the same time, you will probably not succeed in enlisting his kindly interest in your future achievements.

I don't remember when my mother offered me this advice, had she had the opportunity, when I was younger, it would have been daily, although the value of education to a girl of her class was considered to be unnecessary by some, and downright dangerous by others, sir Hugh, and I decided she should go to school at Queen's College in Harley Street.

It's a very disagreeable process.

Finding out that one is no better than the common run.

I've gone through rather a hard course of it at college and I don't like it at all.

After two years of school, her teachers asked her father and me if she could be enrolled at Oxford University.

Well, we were not at first convinced but we allowed ourselves to be persuaded.

The question was, I suppose what else to do with her.

In 1886 Gertrude went to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford as an undergraduate to study modern History.

Oxford University was rather like a club for the sons of the Well to do.

They did not know what to do with women's students.

For our first history lecture we were sent to bail college and we were put on the platform with the Professor Mr Lodge because the men would not make space for us in the benches.

When he had finished Mr Lodge asked rather patronizingly.

I felt well, I wonder what the young lady's maid of that to which I replied, I don't think you added anything to that.

Which you've written in your book.

Gertrude completed her studies in two years instead of the more usual three.

The question with Gertrude that everyone was secretly asking was what now, mm hmm.

When Auntie mary wrote to say that uncle frank was to go to Persia as british Ambassador in Tehran.

I enrolled in a course in Persian at the London School of Oriental studies.

Six months later I was on my way east.

Gertrude wrote home frequently as the old century came to an end and the new one began.

Oh, the desert around Tehran, miles and miles, with nothing nothing growing ringed in with bleak, bare mountains, snow covered and furrowed with deep courses of torrents.

I never knew what desert was until I came here.

It is a very wonderful thing to see.

And suddenly in the middle of it all, out of nothing.

Out of a little cold water springs up a garden, such a garden trees, fountains, tanks of roses, and a house inlaid with tiny slabs of looking glass in a lovely pattern, blue, tiled, carpeted, echoing with the sound of running water and fountains in Persia.

Gertrude had entered a world of revelation here.

That which is me, which is an empty jar that the passerby fills at pleasure is filled with such wine as in England.

I have never heard of how big the world is.

How big and wonderful.

When Gertrude wrote to us from far away places frequently, she wrote off the landscape, I pitched my tent in a grove of apricot trees, snowy with flowers and a hum with bees.

The grass was set thickly within enemies and random killers.

Or on the plains of Jordan's.

It was the most unforgettable sight waist deep in flowers.

I found the loveliest iris I have never yet seen big and sweet scented and so dark purple that the hanging down petals were almost black.

Or the swiss alps, whole hillsides were white as if snow had fallen on them.

White with a big single narcissus.

I never saw anything so beautiful or japan Father.

You are the lord of 110 trees.

Japanese cherries and plums, I think we shall have to induce are respectful father and grandfather to let us make a plantation at round mountain and Mount Grace.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a Japanese cherry grove wherever she went in.

Whatever landscape flowers were like a celestial map for gertrude senses.

At the age of 32, fluent in German French, Italian and Persian, and progressing in Hebrew and Arabic.

She embarked upon her 1st desert adventure.

After a stay in Jerusalem and a visit to the Dead Sea, I decided to embark on a 10 day expedition into the moab hills.

I got a delightful arab stallion and started to ride a stride.

I bought a gray felt hat with black ribbons and the sisters of a nearby convent, made me a divided skirt for riding.

When I wrote home I addressed my letters from my tent, and so a pattern was established using funds.

Her grandfather had bequeathed her.

She would set off on expeditions across the desert and into the mountains with her caravan of two or three servants.

The weather would change from burning hot to freezing driving snow.

In a moment I traversed unmapped terrain and studied the customs and manners of the arab tribes.

I encountered Days of 10 or 12 hours in the saddle became the norm.

It's the greatest relief after you have been riding a horse for eight or nine hours to feel the long comfy swing and the wide soft saddle of a camel beneath you.

The big soft saddle, the She dad is so easy and comfortable and you never tire.

You can loll about and eat your lunch and observe the landscape through your glasses.

My camel is the most charming of animals.

As my confidence in my Arabic grew so I undertook more lengthy expeditions.

But when I was not in the East, I attended courses in chart making, archaeology and photography.

I learned surveying an astronomical observation.

I studied ancient inscriptions and discussed ancient history with experts in the field, but this was knowledge to bring back.

One never keeps away from the east when one is this far into it, Gertrude published papers, travel books, accounts of her archaeological work and more the desert had seized her imagination.

Standing on a Mesopotamian Hilltop in 1911, she pondered the whole world shone like a jewel green crops and blue waters, and far away the gleaning snows of the mountains that bound Mesopotamia to the north.

I considered that the history of Asia was spread out before me.

Nimrod, stood out among the cornfields at my feet a little further and I could see the plane of Arabella where alexander conquered Asia.

We people of the West can always conquer, but we can never hold Asia.

That seemed to me to be the legend written on the landscape.

The land she looked down on would become Iraq and her life would be intertwined in its creation.

But first a shadow would fall across not just the desert but the world.

In 1914, I was at rotten, resting and recovering from my most arduous expedition to date.

I received a request from the war office to write a report on the latest situation in the east which I did.

The Bell report demonstrated.

Gertrude's formidable knowledge to the government, and the value that knowledge would have in the future was clear.

I found work eventually in the Red cross office of the wounded and missing, trying to penetrate the fog of war, to discover the fates of soldiers whose families no longer had news of them.

I went to Beloit and set to trying to create a system in the chaos of letters and telegrams, lists, reports, newspaper articles.

It used all my energy.

I think I've inherited a love of office work.

As the war progressed.

The lists grew and Gertrude's hours got longer and longer.

The letters I receive and answer daily are heart rending.

At any rate.

Even if we give these people little news that is good.

It comforts them.

I think that something is being done to find out what has happened to their beloveds often.

I know myself that there is no chance for them, and have to answer as gently as I can, and carefully keep from them the horrible details which I have learned.

That is my daily job.

I received word that I was to go to Cairo with the rank of major to assist the work of the Bureau of Arab Affairs.

The arab question was complex and intricate, but essentially boiled down to this.

Would the Arab tribes support the british and french against our enemy, the Turkish empire in Mesopotamia.

And what would they want in return?

The amount I've written during the last year is appalling.

Some of it is botched together out of reports, some spun out of my own mind and former knowledge, and some an attempt to fix the far corners of the new world.

It's sometimes exasperated to be obliged to sit in an office when I long to be out in the desert seeing the places I hear of and finding out about them for myself.

In april of 1917 I moved to Baghdad and I found accommodation in a summer house with a beautiful garden, thick with pink roses I planted iris verbena chrysanthemums and violence in pots.

I grew hollyhocks and daffodils from seeds nurtured in darlington.

Oh, my dearest ones!

It's so wonderful here.

I can't tell you how much I'm loving it.

I have grown to love this land, its sights and its sounds.

I never weary of the east, just as I never feel it to be alien.

I cannot feel exiled here.

It is a second native country.

If my family were not in England, I should have no wish to return.