George Harrison – "Beware of Darkness" (1970)

Watch out now, take care

Beware of greedy leaders

They take you where you should not go

(You can say that again, boys and girls!)

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Dhani Harrison – George Harrison’s only child – had no idea his father was a musician until he was in elementary school.

“My earliest memory of my dad is probably of him somewhere in a garden covered in dirt, somewhere hot, a tropical garden, in jeans, khakis covered in dirt, just continuously planting trees,” Dhani told Martin Scorsese in 2011. “I think that’s what I thought he did for the first seven years of my life.” 

Opinions differ over whether Paul McCartney, John Lennon, or George Harrison was the best of the Beatles when it came to songwriting.  But there’s no doubt that Harrison was the best of the Beatles at gardening.

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Harrison purchased the Oxfordshire estate known as Friar Park from an order of nuns in 1970.

Friar Park originally belonged to a wealthy lawyer named Sir Frank Crisp, who had created one of the most incredible gardens in England there.  From an article in Country Life magazine:

Crisp’s creations included a vast alpine rock garden that covered four acres, topped by a scale model of the Matterhorn, as well as a series of stalactites, caves, grottos and underground passages populated by a multitude of garden gnomes. . . .

Crisp was a born collector and one of his passions was for sundials of every type, which he installed in an area he called the Dial Garden. Gnomons, astrolabes, armillary spheres and ring dials – all were corralled into his garden and mounted correctly. The layout copied the plan of the long-lost Labyrinth at Versailles in France, but with 39 sundials in place of the original fountains.

But perhaps the most remarkable feature of Friar Park was its topiary garden, which consisted of more than 160 yew trees pruned and trained into a staggering variety of shapes – including columns, urns, obelisks, vases, spirals . . . and sheep:

The Friar Park topiary garden
as it was a century ago

The nuns had done their best to maintain Friar Park and its garden after purchasing it in 1951, but the expense of doing so eventually became too much for them.  Enter Harrison, who certainly had the means to restore Friar Park to its previous glories.

According to Country Life, “[t]he topiary garden was completely overgrown, reduced to an impenetrable sea of bushes that had grown into each other and overrun by such weeds as ivy and brambles” when Harrison and his wife Olivia took possession of the estate, and “Sir Frank’s sundials had long since disappeared.”

“George used garden flame-throwers to clear the undergrowth and put two goats to clear the weeds and brambles on the rock garden,” Olivia told Country Life in 2023.  “He hired and oversaw a team of local builders, who cleared ceramics and shopping trolleys out of the lake, which the nuns had allowed to be used as a dumping ground.  And he personally oversaw the workmen he hired to cement the leaks and lay new pipework so that the lakes could be filled again.”  

The overgrown yews were pruned back to their trunks.  After they grew back, new topiaries were carved.  Today, the topiary is a mix of traditional and non-traditional forms, including hexagons, pagodas, bullseyes, and waves.

The Friar Park topiary garden today

Country Life calls the “impeccably maintained” topiary garden at Friar Park “a masterpiece – one of the most important in all Europe.”  

Click here to read the entire Country Life article about Friar Park and the Harrisons.

Click here to watch a documentary about Friar Park.

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Harrison wrote “Beware of Darkness” – also a masterpiece – at about the same time that he bought Friar Park.  

The song’s lyrics reflect the influence of Harrison’s deep involvement with the Radha Krishna Temple.  He had invited members of the temple to stay at Friar Park – in part to help him with the restoration of the house and gardens, but mostly in hopes of bringing an intensely spiritual aura to the property.

Click here to learn more about the Radha Krishna Temple.

Click here to listen to “Beware of Darkness,” the antepenultimate member of the 2024 class of inductees into the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME.

Click here to buy “Beware of Darkness” from Amazon.