Early Autumn Beauty, Abbotsbury Gardens

Some of the beautiful things to be seen at Abbotsbury Gardens, Dorset, this weekend. Feast your eyes.

Dyffryn Gardens, Vale of Glamorgan

This garden is almost the perfect mix for me – an excellent botanical garden full of interesting and unusual plants, well-labelled – and a thing of beauty with thoughtful and elegant plant displays laid out in the herbaceous borders and smaller ‘garden rooms’. Something for everyone, indeed.

Being a plant fiend I enjoyed the fernery and the large rockery (at its best in May), as well as the many mature trees. One garden room I stumbled into contained the most glamorous display of colour-co-ordinated annuals and half-hardy plants I’ve ever met with, all set around red-leaved banana plants. I absolutely couldn’t decide which way to look first.

Even so, the highlight for me was the orchid and cactus house (I can never resist a succulent!), and seeing them laid out in a semi-natural setting in this restored glasshouse was a delight. I’d probably still be in there if my family hadn’t dragged me out. Outside, one of the borders was given over to a beautifully-designed summer display of cactus and succulents too – a true labour of love.

This National Trust garden is by no means the largest I’ve visited, but it packs a great deal into the available space without ever seeming cramped, and preserving the long views that are best seen from the house. This is my third visit to Dyffryn and it gets better and better. Highly recommended. For full details see https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/dyffryn-gardens

 

Cerne Abbas Open Gardens, Dorset

Some gorgeous garden scenes from this quintessential English village open day:

Many gardens contained these intricate (and painstaking!) box spheres and cones mixed with a more informal lavender.

A beautiful pool in a cottage garden…

How subtle is this for a use of statuary?

 

An ancient tree, lavender, simple geometry. What could be more restful?

Lush planting, glorious colours. Just breathtaking.

Netherbury Village Open Gardens

Netherbury is a picture-postcard, roses-round-the-door village in deepest Dorset. It sounds like an invention of Thomas Hardy’s, but I can assure you it’s quite real. Ten of the gardens in and around the village were open to visitors last weekend, and I went along on the Sunday in bright sunshine. Here are some of the sights I was treated to (I won’t name the gardens as they are private):

This tiny, high-walled garden was straight out of the Chelsea Flower show, decorated in unlikely modern tones of black and grey. It was so crammed with visitors that I couldn’t get far enough back to take a general view, and had to be satisfied with this charming little water-feature with moody-purple irises. An absolute delight.

 

In complete contrast, the prize for the finest exterior view went to this wide-open hilltop garden. Talk about borrowed landscape! The use of tall white foxgloves in the borders was inspired, too, drawing the eye up and outwards.

This garden, set in a little valley, was very much in the cottage style, lots of roses, lots of perennials – and lots of bees. The whole garden was live and humming.

I loved this restful, unfussy walled garden, which had the feel of a woodland walk on its shadier side. The cream tea we had there was pretty good, too!

Sezincote – the Indian Garden

Sezincote House and Persian garden

Just when you think you’ve seen it all in the English countryside along comes a garden like Sezincote in Gloucestershire. As we walked down the lane from the carpark, I turned to look into the valley beside me and caught a tantalising view that made me gasp. ‘Look!’ I said to my husband, ‘Oh, just look!’

The Indian bridge and Snake Pool

Both garden and house, with its extraordinary dome, lovingly incorporate all kinds of Indian and oriental influences. The garden with its Hindu temple and elegant water-garden of pools and cascades, is full of symbolism, as well as many plants from that part of the world.

Built in a sheltered little ravine, you meet water and richly planted rock-gardens, lawns and a wonderful variety of trees and shrubs, all artlessly naturalistic, but obviously created and maintained with much care. Relatively small and intimate, there are lovely vistas, close and distant at every turn. It is supremely peaceful in a way that makes visitors tend to pause in thought and whisper respectfully; a place for meditation. I loved it.

For more information: http://www.sezincote.co.uk

 

Pilsdon View and Well Cottage, Dorset

These neighbouring gardens, open together for the National Garden Scheme today were a joy to visit. Set on a steep hillside with magnificent views across the emerald hills of Dorset, it was difficult to know whether to look inwards at the beautiful gardens or outwards to the lovely views.

Pilsdon View

Pink alliums and aquilegias set the colour scheme, supported by Japanese maple and copper beech.

Vibrant reds and greens frame this stunning waterfall.

The garden makes great use of a steeply sloping site.

Well Cottage

Not everyone has a giraffe grazing in the shrubbery…

The fabulous view looks like a painted backdrop, but I promise it’s real.

The sheltered and beautiful front garden.

 

For full details of gardens open in your area through the National Garden Scheme, see their website: https://www.ngs.org.uk/

Littlebredy Walled Garden, Dorset

The little River Bride runs through the garden

I remarked to my husband that visits to this wonderful little garden ought to be available on prescription – no-one could fail to be soothed and salved by this place. Set on the sunny side of a little valley surrounded by ancient trees and birdsong, and with the little River Bride flowing right through it, this former kitchen-garden – just one acre – is like stepping into a much slower-paced past. The garden is managed by volunteers, its restoration an ongoing project. One day, perhaps, its cold frames and ruined hothouses will look as they once did, but for now the old vinery at the top of the garden is almost lost under a huge wisteria, the past firmly in the grip of the present.

The planting is loose and wild, with drifts of simple hardy geraniums, clambering roses and many scented plants – lavender and lemon balm – still to come through the summer. I was struck by some of the lovely colour contrasts of leaf and flower: here are just a few.

Late tulips look beautiful against red-leaved lysimachia, yet to flower

This geranium (possibly G. versicolor) makes the most subtle contrast with blue forgetmenots

And finally, these alliums (possibly ‘Purple Sensation’. I’m just guessing) make a stunning mix with the feathery young leaves of fennel.

 

For more information on this garden and the village of Littlebredy see the website: http://www.littlebredy.com/

Sir Harold Hillier Gardens, Hampshire

My visit to this enormous and beautiful garden in early May proved to be perfectly timed to catch the vast Rhododendron collection at its best – but there was so much more to see. The enquiring plant-lover will find no less than 14 national collections of trees and shrubs, including oaks (I had no idea there were so many!), pines, cotoneaster and dogwoods here. These are shown off with subtle and beautiful underplantings, sometimes wild, sometimes carefully tended, and there are fabulous herbaceous borders, rockeries and water plants, too. Everything, even the native oaks and pines the garden has been built around, was carefully and accurately labelled, to my intense delight (I like to know what I’m looking at!) I could have done with at least another day to investigate, and I most certainly didn’t see everything. Here are just a few of the plants I enjoyed meeting.

Eucalyptus dalrympleana, the Mountain Gum, a native of SE Australia, and just one of the thousands of beautiful trees on show from all over the world.

Paeonia tenuifolia, the Fernleaf Peony, a plant native to Russia and Ukraine. I saw this in one of the rockery beds and it was love at first sight. What an absolute beauty. This is a plant I’d dearly love to have in my garden.

It was hard to choose just one Rhododendron from the enormous choice here. They grow superbly well in Hampshire, and this one is a hybrid originating from neighbouring garden Exbury. Rhododendron ‘Strawberry Ice’. Well, what else could you call it?

For full details on Sir Harold Hillier Gardens see www.hants.gov.uk/thingstodo/hilliergardens

Knitson Old Farmhouse, Dorset

Another visit to a National Garden Scheme open garden today – and what a contrast! After last week’s very chilly visit to Chideock Manor, this week’s visit to Knitson Old Farmhouse found us under blue skies and considerable heat. I actually got sunburnt. Such are the ups and downs of British weather. This garden, reached via narrow winding lanes, is a real Dorset treasure, with the Purbeck hills as backdrop. The owner told us she had lived there more than fifty years, and this long residence puts a very personal stamp on the garden. I came away with an impression of golden marigolds and  lilac-coloured honesty, which seemed to find their way into every view.

The beautiful moon arch was created in 2003 and the pool is recently completed.

Marigolds (Calendula officinalis) in shades of orange and yellow were everywhere.

The old farmhouse comfortably settled in its garden. This was the view I had while demolishing my tea and lemon cake.

Honesty (Lunaria annua) was another theme. This one was labelled as Lunaria ‘Corfe Blue’ – and we were just up the road from Corfe Castle.

Both honesty and marigolds found their way into this shot.

 

Knitson Old Farmhouse will be open again on 26 and 27 May.

For full details of gardens open in your area through the National Garden Scheme, see their website: https://www.ngs.org.uk/

Chideock Manor, Dorset

My first visit of the year to a garden open for charity through the NGS (National Open Garden Scheme) was to Chideock Manor, Dorset, at the weekend. It was very chilly indeed, but this beautiful 6 acre garden made up for it.

The delightful knot-garden of box and santolina.

A spectacular rhododendron flowers behind one of the ponds.

The manor’s own intriguing chapel peeps through the foliage and blossom.

The elegant walled vegetable garden with box topiary, ready for planting.

Chideock Manor will be open again for the NGS on 22 and 23 June.

For full details of gardens open in your area through the National Garden Scheme, see their website: https://www.ngs.org.uk/

Blossom at Holme Gardens

My mid-spring visit to Holme Gardens, Dorset, didn’t disappoint, as you can see. Display after display of tulips and late hyacinths each more eye-boggling than the last – and some wonderful blossom.

It wasn’t a specially bright day – but my goodness, the fiery colours warmed it up.

Stunning pinks in the palm garden.

A background of soft blossom brings out the tulips, hyacinths and colour-coordinated pyramids.

And the blossom in detail: the perfectly-named Prunus ‘Snow Showers’

 

Gorgeous crab-apple  – Malus ‘Louisa’

And one of my favourite plants, the weeping pear (Pyrus salicifolia).

 

 

Magnolias at Abbotsbury

I guess it’s the transience of spring flowers that makes them so appealing. Blink and they’re gone. So my visit to Abbotsbury Gardens, Dorset (a regular haunt) was specially delightful, filled as it was with bulbs, rhododendrons and camellias. For me, though, it was the magnolias that won the day. Abbotsbury has a fine collection, some of them fairly recently planted, some enormous old trees, and I enjoyed them all. Be sure to get along and see your local magnolias before they’re gone!

Here are some of the Abbotsbury beauties:

Magnolia x soulangeana ‘Sundew’

Magnolia x proctoriana

Magnolia ‘Galaxy’

Magnolia ‘Manchu Fan’

Magnolia dawsoniana

Magnolia ‘Tina Durio’

 

For more information about Abbotsbury Subtropical Garden see their website https://abbotsbury-tourism.co.uk/gardens/

Gorgeous Camellias

Seen today at Holme Gardens, Dorset (expect much more reporting from here, as I’m now the proud holder of a season ticket) – some beautiful camellias in full flower. They are fairly recently planted and have much growing to do, but they’re already putting on a good show. It was a joy to look at them on a draughty February day.

This supremely elegant variety is Camellia japonica ‘Roger Hall’. What an absolute stunner!

This one reminds me of a peony. The aptly named C. japonica ‘Sundae’ certainly has a different look about it.

And finally, another classically elegant deep pink – Camellia ‘Free Spirit’.

 

The Winter Garden: Holme, Dorset

I am a regular visitor to this delightful garden. In summer its lush herbaceous borders are a wonder – but it’s a stunning winter garden, too.

As the hedges fill in the garden belies its heritage as a very flat fruit-field. Statuary, urns and garden ornaments all add to the effect.

These dead grass-tops add wonderful subtle colour and contrast. And of course, they’re beautiful in summer, too.

Trees add height and beautiful bark, along with stunning-coloured dogwoods and spreading pampas grasses. The planting is just beautiful, as you can see.

Woven in among these winter beauties is an excellent collection of conifer varieties, some still very young, but already creating an impact, like this golden Scots pine. They are all clearly labelled, for conifer connoisseurs.

If you’re anywhere in the area, I urge you to visit Holme Gardens – entry is free through the winter, and there is a very fine garden centre attached.

For full information on Holme Gardens, visit their website http://www.holmeforgardens.co.uk/

 

 

Best of 2018 – Goodnestone Park

My final choice of favourite gardens visited in 2018 is Goodnestone Park, Kent. The walled garden here is one of the finest I’ve seen – and I have a real penchant for walled gardens. Even when I was there in the rather delayed spring this year,  it was beautiful and full of promise for the summer.

May I take the opportunity to wish everyone a happy year of garden visiting in 2019.