This will be my last post on Great Dixter. As I’ve already said, it was our favorite English garden. We liked it so much, in fact, that I felt compelled, almost against my will, to enjoy some of the topiary. But only because it was so very silly. This was in the Peacock Garden. It’s …
After swooning over the Long Border, the next area we walked through was the Orchard Garden and the High Garden. I’m treating them as a single unit for two reasons. First, I’m not completely sure which pictures were taken in which garden. And second, to me both gardens had the same sense of joyful anarchy. …
Time for more distraction from the snow. Here’s another installment about our visit to Great Dixter. Leaving the Sunken Garden with its pond, we walked through a stone arch toward the Wall Garden. An unexpected feature of the Wall Garden was the mosaic portrait of Christopher Lloyd’s two dachshunds, Dahlia and Canna. I like how …
After enjoying Sissinghurst’s Cottage Garden, we strolled on to the Nuttery. This is a word I was unfamiliar with, but it means a place where you grow nuts. A comical-sounding word, suggesting all sorts of bad puns. The Nuttery has a shady woodland feel, with its Ostrich Ferns (Matteucia strutheopteris) and rows of tall hazels …
A day after seeing RHS Wisley, John and Pauline drove us to see Sissinghurst, the garden created in the 1930s by Vita Sackville-West. I’m embarrassed to admit that I have never read a single one of Sackville-West’s gardening books (or her novels, poems, or other writings for that matter). This, combined with the thousands of …
Here are some more pictures from RHS Wisley. I have to confess I had trouble remembering which pictures were from which part of the garden. I even printed out a map and tried to trace our route, but still ended up a little confused. I do remember that this is from Battleston Hill. At the …
Wisley, I’m told, is the flagship garden of the Royal Horticultural Society. There are actually an amalgam of many gardens on its 240 acres. However, I could have spent the entire day swooning over the two ebullient mixed borders that seemed to go on forever, combining shrubs, perennials, grasses, and vines. Sometimes these borders seemed …
The first garden we saw outside of London was at Scotney Castle. Our friends John and Pauline drove us there after picking us up at the train station. Scotney Castle includes a one acre walled garden and a 19 acre park built around an old fortified manor house (Old Scotney Castle) and a pond. …
So I found another couple of gardens from the Garden Bloggers Fling in San Francisco that I never did write about. One was the Palo Alto garden of Andrea and Andy Testa-Vought, designed by Bernard Trainor. Though very different from the kind of Midwest gardens I am used to, I admired how this garden created …
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