When a garden has been open to the public for a long time, it’s easy to take it for granted. East Lambrook Manor garden in Somerset is just such a case. After seventeen years in the capable care of Mike Werkmeister and his late wife Gail, ELM had been on the market since 2023, but…
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After the long hot dry summer we’ve had it seems hard to imagine a time of endless rain and miserable floods. But that was the precisely the situation at Kilver Court – an RHS partner garden – in January and February last year, when the gardens and other parts of the site were inundated. Eighteen months…
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A trial with no tribulations Before you can just stroll into the garden centre and buy a rose, it must be trialled for health and garden worthiness, and its blooms assessed for colour, beauty and scent. This June I was lucky enough to have been invited, along with other members of the Garden Media Guild,…
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The best ‘temporary exhibitions’ resonate long after the exhibits are taken down and sent back to their institutional or private owners. So it was with Ravilious the reputation-redefining retrospective of the artist and designer Eric Ravilious, held in 2015 at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Curated by James Russell the exhibition was a comprehensive re-evaluation of…
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Created by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson from 1930, and owned by the National Trust since 1967, the garden at Sissinghurst Castle Gardens is at the top of most garden lovers’ ‘must-see’ lists. Visitors still flock to Sissinghurst garden, even as the ‘shillingses’ did in Vita’s day – over 170,000 of them in the 2022/3…
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You don’t need me to tell you how challenging this on-off summer has been for gardeners. Usually hymned as havens of well-being, many gardens this year have become dens of despondency as low light levels stopped growth in its tracks and legions of slugs emerged after a mild wet winter to lay waste to beds…
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Size is relative, but I think I can safely say my garden is on the small side. Although there is room for a trio of young fruit trees, two sheds and a scruffy patch of grass it’s more pocket handkerchief than palatial park. So it came as a bit of a surprise to find, when…
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The painter Jean Cooke (1927-2008) was well ahead of the current trend for wild gardening when she listed ‘ungardening’ among her hobbies in Who’s Who. A new exhibition at The Garden Museum reveals how the artist – overshadowed for many years by her coercive husband and fellow painter John Bratby – found both inspiration and…
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Although technically still winter, February is the month when you can really sense spring just around the corner. The snowdrop is the iconic plant that signals the beginning of the end of winter and getting out to see a snowdrop garden is a wonderful way to start the gardening year. Here are some of my…
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Will the simple pleasures of gallery going, museum meandering and garden gandering be all the sweeter after months of lockdown? It seems highly likely, and with pre-booked time slots and carefully restricted visitor numbers, the experience of seeing an exhibition in the ‘new normal’ might arguably be even better with more space and time to…
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