You know what it’s like: you wait ages for a new garden and then two arrive at the same time. Unlike the proverbial buses, however these gardens don’t require me to choose one over the other – I’m hopping on both and seeing where they take me. One garden has arrived courtesy of a house…
DetailsEntering someone’s garden via a stepladder over the fence is not the most conventional way to start a visit, but that’s what happened when I went to look at Kay Thomson’s garden earlier this month. Her garden shares a boundary with that belonging to her friends Susan Bennett & Earl Hyde, the irrepressible assistant county…
DetailsI’m so lucky to live in the Quantocks. Despite being an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (the first area to be so designated, in 1956), the Quantock Hills are usually gloriously empty of people, despite their relative proximity to Taunton, Bridgwater and Bristol. It’s rare to meet many other walkers, even on a fine day,…
DetailsI’m a great believer that nice things come in small packages and if like me you enjoy museums that are more bijou than behemoth then a visit to the Holburne Museum in Bath beckons. The museum comes perfectly wrapped within a neat little Georgian villa, whose pediment’d and portico’d façade looks out over Great Pulteney…
DetailsLondoners probably best know the work of the great Victorian artist GF Watts less through his paintings than through two very different installations in the capital. The first is the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice in Postman’s Park in Aldersgate, the unique memorial initiated by Watts in 1900 to commemorate the bravery of ordinary people; the…
DetailsWells was recently acclaimed by the Sunday Times as one of the top 30 places in the county to live. It’s certainly one of my favorite places to visit for a weekend outing, but in 10 years of Somerset residency I’m ashamed to admit I’d never visited the Bishops’s Palace until last Sunday. Visiting late…
DetailsBy happy chance my recent holiday in the south of France co-incided with the annual “Journées Européenes du Patrimoine”, the French equivalent of our Open House weekend. By even happier chance I spotted in the local paper that an interesting sounding garden in Cannes was opening for the event, near where we were staying. Situated…
DetailsI’ve mentioned my love of walled gardens on this blog before, and last year visited Cannington walled garden, just down the road from where I live. Barley Wood Walled Garden is another Somerset gem, requiring a glorious late summer drive from one range of Somerset hills (the Quantocks) to another (the Mendips). The garden itself…
DetailsWhat a fantastic week to have taken a garden research trip to London – accompanied by radiant sunshine I managed to see over 8 gardens in under 3 days and it was utter bliss. First up was a refresher visit to The Chelsea Physic Garden, which was looking voluptuous in its mid-summer pomp. I was…
DetailsBlog postings on this site have been a bit thin on the ground of late. Apologies – I’ve temporarily deserted my posts (as it were) to blog for the Chelsea Fringe, the fantastic new festival of gardening that burst onto the horticultural scene last summer. With entries coming in thick and fast, the 2013 Fringe…
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