The potager – that ornamental version of the vegetable garden was always a bit precious. Too many people had visited Chateau Villandry on the Loire and thought they could do a mini-version. The results were all too often a neurotic assemblage of over-controlled vegetables that no-one dare harvest as it would spoil the picture. Continue Reading →
Detail of light tubes from “SOL Grotto”
We interrupt the regularly scheduled garden photography lesson to bring you some breaking news. While I was writing this lesson in The PhotoBotanic Garden Photography Workshop, controversy erupted.
Provocation in the world of gardens and art ! National scandal in “hip, pretentious art” at the Berkeley Botanical Garden where an on-site art exhibit using recycled glass tubes became an example of “phony intellectualism”. Continue Reading →
Opened our garden on Sunday, for the National Garden Scheme, which for those of you who don’t know it, raises money for charities through encouraging private gardens to open to the public. They have been running since 1927, and now have thousands of gardens in the famous Yellow Book guide. Its not the first time I’ve participated in the scheme but the first for our current garden. Not surprisingly garden visiting is listed as one of the most popular hobbies in Britain. Continue Reading →
One of the greatest collaborations in the making of a garden is that of Vita Sackville West and her husband Harold Nicholson.
Here’s a peek at Sissinghurst, one of the most famous and loved gardens in the world.
For the history of Sissinghurst, visit The National Trust website.
More about Vita and a love letter she wrote to Virginia Wolf in the book The 50 Greatest Love Letters of All Time at Brain Pickings.….one of my favorite blogs.
Looking south over the walled garden over loch Ewe.
This is one of those really famous gardens, but in such a remote location that you don’t just drop in. Fifty miles from the nearest supermarket, inform my hosts, as if this is now the definition of distance from civilization or maybe survival. Inverewe on the north-west coast of Scotland is famous as a ‘sub-tropical’ garden, which is nonsense, but it is an illustration that with a bit of shelter, the climate here is amazingly west-coast mild, rarely that cold, and never hot – ideal for New Zealand flora and good for a lot of Himalayan foothill stuff. The contrast with the surrounding barren treeless scenery is extraordinary and gives the place its magic. Continue Reading →
