Good enough to eat - West Dean Gardens

Last month I did manage to visit one fantastic garden and on this grey, murky day I just thought I'd share some sunny photos of that day in October!

West Dean Gardens are the grounds to West Dean College in West Sussex which is a renowned College offering post-graduate and short courses in various arts, crafts and garden design. The gardens include a wonderfully restored Victorian kitchen garden. That put it on the list for a visit as part of researching my final project, a former frameyard at the National Trust's Mottisfont - see my last blog post

Visiting West Dean really brought that heyday of Victorian walled gardens to life, a time when producing fruit, vegetables and cut flowers for the big house was a year round operation on a grand and energy intensive scale. At the height of exotic fruit production, having pineapples on the table was like having a Rolls on the drive. Seeing the restored glasshouses, coldframes, pits for forcing pineapples and melons and trained fruit trees at West Dean, as well as the beds packed with vegetables and cut flowers gave me a lot of inspiration.

The beautiful weather really helped - it made the glass architecture shine and all the produce look even more amazing. Here are a few photos. Definitely worth a visit and the courses there look amazing if you want something creative.

Above: gourds in wonderful and weird shapes on display. What a great word gourd is.
Above right: the fab glasshouses which I became faintly obsessed with taking pictures of. Figs are growing in the top one and a late vine still has grapes on it in the one shown below. Peaches, nectarines and the like are also grown in these wonderful buildings.

Left: I don't know what they are putting in their compost, but something is working - all the veg looks amazing. Giant everything!

Below top: the orchard in the late afternoon sun. This really inspired me for my project: I included an orchard meadow with spring bulbs and wildflowers.

Below middle: a restored pineapple pit. It would have been heated by putting manure in the trench around the edge(under the planks) and the heat would have gone through gaps in the bricks. So now you know.

Let the mild weather continue but some sunny weather please!



My mum in the Harold Peto pergola, a massive 300 feet long Edwardian masterpiece - also at West Dean



A wonderful week at Great Dixter

I'm still revelling in the experiences I had last week at Great Dixter, a magnificent garden in Sussex known for the daring, unusual and exciting planting schemes created by the late Christopher Lloyd and continued by his head garden Fergus Garrett.

It is a truly inspiring place to have spent a week working - the spirit of the garden is unique and I hope that even just a tiny bit of it will have rubbed off on me and will influence the way I approach garden design. It is a garden which looks and feels spontaneous yet it is the product of careful planning, continuous upkeep and the tireless application of a principle of 'succession planting' whereby plants (bulbs, self-sown annuals, early and later flowering perennials) replace each other in a bed to provide constant, packed interest in borders.

I was at Great Dixter with three of my classmates from KLC. Also there for a work placement was John, a trainee gardener at Hidcote in Gloucestershire, another famous English garden. I'm not sure how he really felt about being landed with us four girls for week but we certainly enjoyed his company and as well as his excellent plant knowledge and splendid attire. One evening during the week he arranged for us to visit Sissinghurst, yet another classic English garden. We had the place to ourselves and it was a wonderful experience. So here's a picture of four of us there that evening:

Back to Great Dixter. Even with my limited photographic skills I could fill pages and pages with beautiful images of the garden. All the fantastic planting combinations are set against a structure which is the backbone of the garden: the house, a series of outbuildings, and a network of clipped hedges, topiary and stone paths which divide the space into distinct areas or rooms. Here are just a few images to try and capture it:

Perhaps the most famous of Christopher Lloyd's creations in the garden is the Long Border - I had the pleasure of spending much of last Friday in there tidying, dead-heading and generally enjoying the experience of talking to visitors in the sunshine.  




I took some of my best shots early one morning when Abby and I spent a good couple of hours sweeping many of the paths in the garden. Even a seemingly mundane job like this was fun, providing a chance to get up close to the plants, admire the colours in the morning light and even take a sneaky picture or two...

 Another of the activities we got involved in was harvesting vegetables for sale to visitors at the house, for cooking in the house and for selling at the Hastings carnival street fair last Thursday. We went down there and Great Dixter stall stood out along the street with giant Gunnera leaves towering into the sky.

 Around 50,000 visitors a year come to the garden and most, if not all, will be inspired by colours, textures and shapes which they never could have imagined working together. Fergus is providing the leadership to make sure that the garden continues to be new and exciting for visitors now and we experienced first hand how he is still experimenting each year in the garden with new ideas. If they don't work, so be it, he'll try another idea next year. This was very refreshing to see!

Great Dixter is an amazing place to visit, even for those who aren't really into gardening at all. I'm not sure there are too many gardens you can say that about.  

Back at Inner Temple, but this time just to enjoy the flowers!

When I was at the Bar I used to enjoy the odd lunch in Inner Temple gardens when work and weather allowed. Inner Temple (and Middle Temple) are sandwiched between Fleet Street and the Thames, a network of alleyways and squares with grand buildings providing home to numerous sets of barristers. Perhaps Inner Temple is best known today (at least as far as tourists are concerned) for its church which gives a star turn in The Da Vinci Code! 

Big alliums make a big impact

Inner Temple gardens are beautiful, a real little sanctuary in the city with lawns stretching to the embankment, stunning unusual trees and fabulous herbaceous borders. Today I went in for the first time since I left Chambers having met a former colleague for lunch nearby. 

The borders are looking as good as I remembered them to be. What really stood out were the giant alliums which stand tall and huge out in the large borders - I think they are Allium 'Globemaster' which have enormous flowerheads as these do. What is so great is that when these are over the seedheads will continue to provide a feature then, when finally cut back, they'll pop up from their bulbs again next year.


Below is the border in all its glory with a really effective contrast of the purple alliums against the bright yellow of day lilies (Hemerocallis) and the Aquilegia (possibly A. chrysanthanta Yellow Queen) in the foreground with their stunning flowers. What is great about Aquilegia flowers are the long spurs that flare out behind the flowers - on this large type they really are clear to see. And there are those red poppies marking little red spots along the border's front edge against the gentle blue forget-me-nots. Bright, informal and lovely.

And just to finish off a shot of one of the beds lining the stone steps down to the lawn, a silver and white theme dominated here - and you can just see a couple of the magnificent trees in the background.

Glad to have been back, but loved the fact I could leave without the any thought of the law!