On a warm bright autumn in mid-November we took advantage of the covid lockdown rule allowing us out for exercise and booked a slot at Attingham Park our local National Trust property.
We really enjoyed the amazing sense of freedom we felt every minute of our wanderings. It felt great to take a few photos again! Here they are! The last few show some knitted animals placed among a shrubbery for the autumn season.
Opening our own garden along with Vicky, Rosa and Jacob’s next door garden early in July made us one of Shropshire’s first open gardens under the new timed ticket system.
The first Shropshire NGS garden we visited was a little later when we visited Offcot, a garden with a younger gardener/owner than is the norm with NGS gardens.
We arrived at the gate of the garden and were greeted by our friend Ruth, an assistant organiser for the NGS Shropshire. Ruth had assisted at out opening and also sold some of her plants but here at Offcot she was on the gate and serving refreshments too. A warm welcome from Ruth and brightly coloured flowers as we entered the garden both boded well for the visit.
Around the first corner we were stopped dead by this unusual piece of recycled metal sculpture! But from then on it was the planting that we stopped to admire.
We are not fans of annual bedding plants and we don’t like petunias either but we were amazed at the quality of these plants especially those hanging plant collections.
We enjoyed the choice of colours of roses and dahlias, with some unusual shades in evidence.
It always feels good wandering around a garden when longer views catch the eye, especially where borders surround patches of neatly cut grass.
We really enjoyed this visit to a refreshingly good garden and of course the first visit after lockdown to a Shropshire NGS garden.
During lockdown we were also shielding because of my vulnerable status due to a blood condition and COPD so during that time we were unable to meet up with others. Towards the end of that period we were due to celebrate our 50th Wedding Anniversary with friends and family. Sadly this could not happen but we do have a special gift from Jude the Undergardener’s mother, Sheila which has now taken pride of place in one of our sitting areas.
It is a corten steel relief sculpture of a Tree of Life, which looks wonderful against a newly painted brick wall. It features three birds enjoying its branches.
This beautiful silhouette can be seen along a long view down the central path from the .bottom of the garden. Lovely to look at as we walk up the path back towards the house.
As promised I am back sharing with you our summer time visit to the gardens at Waterperry.
Through this wooden gate we discovered a formal garden divided into four sections all featuring interesting and unusual alpines. The golden crocus lookalikes are Sternbergia lutea. Since seeing this beautiful patch we ordered a dozen for our own garden.
The orange flowers looking somewhat like Pentstemon pinifolia ‘Wisley Fire’ was in fact Zauschneria californica ‘Dublin’. Again, although we already grow P. ‘Wisley Fire’ we have bought the Zauschneria too and planted it in scree,
Occasionally when exploring gardens we come across seats that really surprise and impress and here at Waterperry we did just that. The first, the ‘Head Gardener’ seat seems to suit me! I want one! Jude obviously equally enjoyed the other.
As well as garden seats we discovered a spherical stone water feature which had the thinnest film of water seeping over its edge and down the sides. Completely different but again rather interesting was this thatched dovecote.
These metal and glass screens looked equally good close-up as they did from a distance. The light altered their colours as we moved around them.
I will finish this report on our return visit to Waterperry Gardens with photos of this beautiful figure sculpture sitting on top of the wall and a stunning piece of cloud pruning.
Waterperry in Oxfordshire is a garden we have visited a few times in the past and enjoyed it every time, so finding the opportunity to drop in while traveling down south we welcomed it.
Set up in 1932 the garden is the home of the School of Horticulture for Ladies run by the stern-looking Beatrix Havergal. Today it is a glorious garden which gave us several hours of enjoyable wandering.
We visited at a time when I was writing a new garden talk titled, “Fabulous Foliage, the unsung hero of our gardens”, so many of my photos focused on the way the gardeners put foliage colours and textures together. The pear orchard was a very peaceful place and looked to promise great crops before too long.
The garden is punctuated with pieces of sculptures varying widely in style, from the beautiful figure in the canal to the rather formal to the beautiful obelisk with words from the Koran on each face.
Probably our favourite part of the garden was the designated ‘quiet place’ which was an enclosed garden exuding calm and peace. The planting softened the formal layout and the beautiful sculptural figure with the lamp pulled us towards it. I was so impressed by the simple but effective plant combinations at her feet.
The most colourful areas in the garden were the trial beds and the long richly planted herbaceous border.
Waterperry Gardens have so much to offer and there is so much we haven’t shared with you in this post, so I will continue in part 2.
Two terrible storms hit the UK during February, both named storms – Storm Ciara and Dennis. We are always in the line of such storms and get battered by gale force winds and heavy precipitation, rain, hail, sleet and snow and both our house and our garden suffered badly. Our roof lost part of the ridge and a length of fascia board and in the garden we lost fence panels, a gate, trellises complete with their climbing plants and two rare specimen trees.
Our back gate was torn from its hinges and the fence either side is no longer fixed to many of its posts. It is held up be faith awaiting the next storm to finish it off. The right hand photo shows the mangled tangle of trellis that was a T-shaped structure which had a Clematis Bill MacKenzie, a bright yellow flowered ‘tangutica’ variety, and a honeysuckle, Lonicera periclymenum, our native honeysuckle also known as Old Man’s Beard. We had to prune so much growth out just to rescue the plants and dismantle the broken trellis.
Our favourite tree was flattened but its roots remain in the ground – fingers crossed we may be able to rescue with the help of a woodsman friend. This is the second this has happened to this beautiful specimen of Cercis siliquastrum which delights with its pink spring flowers and later its ruby red pods. The right hand picture shows how most of the tree is now over the fence into the neighbouring garden.
The second beautiful unusual specimen tree to be blown over was our yellow-berried cotoneaster, Cotoneaster rothschildiana. We managed to get it back up and used tree ties to secure it against a larger tree stake, as seen in the left hand picture below.
Sadly during the next storm it came out again and we had to put it back up and fix it with tree ties to two tree stakes.
Our recently acquired corten steel screens were blown backwards and are now all asquew, so we will have to refit them with tougher supports.
The name for this garden was a bit off-putting but once through the gates we warmed to it immediately. This was a collection of outdoor sculpture of all sorts, a huge variety in fact but there was the important element of a garden wander to see all the pieces.
As soon as we entered through the rustic gateway we knew we were in for a treat, as sculpture was placed all around in trees, shrubs, in borders in grassed areas. We made our way across for refreshments and checked out the map to get an idea of a route we could follow and not miss any areas out.
Here is a selection of some of the weird and wonderful characters we met on our wanders.
We were delighted to discover sculptural pieces that were also musical instruments. They were so simple but very beautiful.
This was one of those gardens with a second string to its bow, the sculpture. It made for a good day out!
In 2019 we spent a warm and humid mid-July day at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire where we explored the gardens for the whole day, refreshed by the largest ice-cream cones we have ever enjoyed. It is one of the UK’s largest gardens and is full of interesting planting, unusual features and some wonderful glasshouses. These glasshouses are the work of a past head gardener Joseph Paxton. You need a whole day to really appreciate these gardens and you need to plan your day well.
The first set of photos shows the beauty of the glasshouses both old and new at Chatsworth and a beautiful mature specimen of Cedrus atlantica ‘Glauca’ and a subtly planted pot.
We made our way around the glasshouses towards the productive garden, which we knew had been developed since our previous visit and enjoyed some interesting plants and plant combinations along the way.
Sculpture is always in evidence at Chatsworth and there was plenty of interest on this visit, from classical to modern, wood and stone and hidden away throughout the gardens.
And then we came across this amazing seat which is a piece of sculpture in its own right.
So here we are with the second part of this visit to Houghton Hall in Norfolk, a post refound!
Although our main reason for visiting the gardens at Houghton Hall was to explore the land art created by Richard Long within its grounds and house, we also planned to enjoy the gardens in their own right.
The gardens featured huge expanses of sweeping lawns broken up by pleached hedges and topiary. As we approached the house we were surprised to see a circle of stumps arranged on the grassed area, like a stump henge. Each individual root stump was beautiful in its own right but the circular arrangement added another dimension, the dimension of mystery.
The pleached lime hedges presented a strong structural element to the lawned areas. The strong sunlight on the day gave patterns of light and shade, cool and warm. Some of the raised hedges were tall enough for us to easily walk beneath them to experience these contrasts, which was most welcome on such a warm day. Looking out from beneath the pleached blocks of lime gave us framed views of the expanse of the gardens. Further surprises appeared periodically mostly in classical style, stone columns and seats and occasional modern pieces.
In complete contrast to the formality of the parkland areas discussed above, roses featured in softer more romantic borders. This planting felt very soft, restful and gentle.
The parkland was separated from the farmland surrounding it by a “ha ha”, the cleverest way to keep livestock out of formal gardens.
We enjoyed a diversion off one of the main paths while searching for more Richard Long installations, and the narrow path was edged with beautifully cloud-pruned box hedging. The pathway led us to a “Skyspace” by James Turrell. We love his work so spent time sitting inside watching the moving weather. So peaceful!
In complete contrast to the open parkland and grassed areas with architectural planting features, we found another area of the garden at Houghton, the Walled Garden such a contrast. This part of the garden will be the subject of the third post concerning Houghton Hall.
This post, one of two about Houghton Hall in Norfolk wasn’t published at the time so here it is now, found again and ready to be sent out albeit rather late!
Richard Long is one of our favourite land artists and until this year we had only seen a few isolated examples of his work. While travelling towards our holiday venue in Norfolk we noticed, as we drove along, large signs advertising an exhibition of his work at Houghton Hall. We could not believe our luck! We soon set aside a day to visit the garden and exhibition.
The exhibition was called Earth Sky and we had seen a few of the pieces there in the past and thought it a great location for his work.
There were a couple of pieces we particularly wished to study, “A Line in Norfolk” and “North South East West”. We have already seen a similar piece to “A Line in Norfolk” at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park a few times over the last few years. There, the line of sandstone ran like a perfectly straight path into a lake. It looked amazing and magical. The other piece we wished to see had been featured in a magazine article and simply looked so perfect and satisfying sitting dead centre in a room in the house itself.
“A Line in Norfolk”
“North South East West”
As well as the pieces exhibited within the grounds a selection of much smaller pieces were on display along a corridor within the hall itself, delicate prints on driftwood and recycled pieces of wood.
Long experimented with splashes of white paint carefully and very deliberately thrown nto wall recesses previously painted black in readiness. The effects were fascinating and got the creative thinking going in overdrive. We saw simple but beautiful patterns, water falls, landscapes and much more within the lively white paint marks.
“White Water Falls”
I shall put more “White Water Falls” pics in the following gallery along with more photos of Richard Long pieces from his exhibition at Houghton Hall. Enjoy!
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