Celebrating gardens, photography and a creative life
Great Dixter’s spirit is as multifaceted as any fine garden. You’d need to visit, often – or better still, live or work there to understand the effects of sunrise stealing over the garden, those late summer sunsets, and all weathers and seasons playing out.
Continue reading “Great Dixter: An Arts and Crafts Garden with Holistic Planting”
We were fortunate to be able to visit Bridgewater after a night of snowfall this week. As we didn’t win the garden visit lottery by having a bright blue sky too, my pictures are a little sombre – some, even Gothic. Continue reading “Winter Gardens: Visiting RHS Bridgewater on a Snowy Day”
I don’t usually use featured headers, but I wanted to share some of the feeling of being immersed in flowers you could enjoy, even from the edge of this cramscape. Continue reading “Never Heard of Cramscaping? Check Out Tatton’s Bold, Joyful Show Garden”
At the Royal Horticulture Society’s Hampton Court Flower Show earlier this year, I had chance to indulge in one of my favourite pastimes – looking out for flowering plants that are companionable minglers.
Floral threads included various colours and forms of Achillea, Campanula, Catanache, Digitalis (foxglove), Echinacea, Geranium, Knautia, Lychnis, Nepeta, Salvia, Scabious, Stachys and Verbena. Continue reading “Cottage Garden Plant Combinations From The Hampton Court Palace Show”
Plant combinations fascinate me, so I loved the way these flowers, foliage and billowing grasses were painting their lines and colours against the textured background of a gravel mulch in the most alluring feature garden at this year’s Hampton Court Flower Show.
The effect previewed the romantic, soft planting trend that would be taken further at the Tatton Park Show a few weeks later.
The plants pictured here include:
Allium sphaerocephalon (drumstick allium; purple)
Galactities tomentosa alba (milk thistle; creamy-white)
Verbena officinalis var grandiflora ‘Bampton’ (vervain Bampton; lavender-pink)
Erigeron ‘Dimity’ (fleabane; pink)
Nepeta racemosa ‘Walker’s Low’ (catmint; lavender-blue)
Santolina chamaecyparissus (cotton lavender; yellow)
Stipa tenuissima (Mexican feather grass) Continue reading “Carol Klein’s Iconic Horticultural Hero Garden”
While your eye may naturally pick out the flowers, when I was face-to-face with this memorable landscape, I marvelled at that long, structured wall of tree trunks and re-purposed construction materials in the background. The fauna wall was by far the biggest insect hotel I’d ever seen.
Broad swathes of the Wilde Weelde garden’s boundary are made from small sections of logs of different diameters, stacked leaving gaps between them – the log version of a dry stone wall, you might say. The effect reminded me of the ramparts of a castle, except these walls have gaps that a raider could saunter through. Continue reading “Wilde Weelde, Floriade: a Partnership Between Humans and Nature”
I’m not sure I’d have enjoyed my favourite garden at Floriade as much if I’d seen it in April, soon after Floriade opened to visitors. In pictures of the Europarcs garden taken before the deciduous trees had leafed out, The Rebel House commands the space. A broad, meandering path wraps around the clean, metal-edged outlines of flower beds. Newly-planted perennials are neat, well-spaced and picture perfect, like an architect’s diagram.
Three months later, the plants have bedded in and are relaxing out. Leaves and flowering stems mingle and mesh together, gently spilling over the path. The ‘Within Nature’ theme of the garden is emerging. Continue reading “Biodiverse Planting Scheme by Stefano Marinaz for the EuroParcs Garden, Floriade”
Susan Rushton 