I went this afternoon to visit a local garden that was open under the Yellow Book scheme, after a break of a year or two. I'd arranged ages ago to meet a gardening friend there, since it is more or less mid-way between our two houses, and sounded as though it would be worth half an hour's drive to see. I e-mailed her yesterday to see if she still wanted to go, trying hard to get the tone of the message right, so as to convey that I was enthusiastic about going, if she wanted to, but wouldn't be offended if she didn't. I would have been genuinely happy either way, since on the one hand it would be nice to see her and visit a garden I'd never visited before, but on the other hand I had loads to get on with at home. I know the feeling, when a week has already ended up very, very busy, if yet another request is made on your time. You can be perfectly fond of your latest caller, and like the prospect of whatever is being proposed this time, while having a helpless feeling that it would be so much better if it could only happen later and not now, this week.
My gardening friend has a tough job, and a large garden that she is trying to develop on a shoestring budget, and was busy, but sounded relieved to have the excuse of a couple of hours off from it all, and we trundled around happily looking at trees and refreshed ourselves with mugs of tea and carrot cake. The garden, Horkesley Hall, is not open again for the NGS this year, but is nice enough that it's worth making a note of the name, and keeping an eye out for openings next year. Indeed, now I've looked at their page on the National Gardens Scheme website I see that they are open by appointment. Whether or not you feel comfortable getting garden owners to open up especially for you is probably an individual taste. I've been to a few by arrangement, and enjoyed myself every time, but if you dislike feeling conspicuous and would rather be allowed to wander at will than get the guided tour then you might prefer to go on a general open day.
Horkesley Hall garden wraps around an impressive brick built house which I took to be Georgian. It has an enormous portico, and sash windows with very slender glazing bars. The house is not open, but teas were served in a downstairs room which you entered via the bottom half of one of the sash windows, while the owner squeaked in case anyone banged their head on the frame. A television somewhere in the background was set to a racing channel, and I don't think the owners bought their own furniture.
I was a little early arriving at the garden, and as I sat by the ticket desk, which was where we'd agreed to meet on the grounds that we didn't know the layout but there had to be one, I overheard the owner telling another visitor how after a previous open day, someone had written a letter of complaint, not even to her but to the NGS organisers, because there was a weed in the garden. Of course there are weeds. It is a private garden covering eight acres. You can't expect every last little part to be manicured as if it were Chelsea. Later on, when she served us our tea, I told her how I'd once known somebody whose reaction to their first visit to Great Dixter was to grumble that there had been a huge sow thistle, right in one of the borders. Some people were never satisfied.
There are a lot of trees at Horkesley Hall. Almost too many, in that their crowns are meeting into an almost continuous canopy, and you can't quite see them as individual specimens as it would be nice to do. Somebody, around thirty or forty years ago, planted them a little too close. It's easily done, indeed, I've done it myself on a smaller scale on our bottom lawn with the trio of river birches and the Zelkova grown from seed, and the not-a-swamp-cypress next to the golden deodar. They look so tiny in their early years, and there are so many that you want to grow, you can't believe how they will fill out.
The star arboreal feature is the Ginkgo, which the owners say is the largest outside Kew. It is large, and very lovely, with a great scaly bole. It must be older than many of the other trees, and is planted at one corner of the terrace in front of the house. When it gains a few more inches girth it will start to press against the retaining wall of the terrace, and they will have to decide whether to let the trunk deform as it wraps itself round the built landscape, or chisel the corner off the terrace.
In a field at the bottom of the garden were grazing a mare and foal, and a notice told us that this was the mare's tenth foal, and that she had been a winning racehorse in her youth, while the foal's sire had won the Epsom Derby. We were duly impressed, as I was by the cards with the owners' racing colours on propped up on the mantelpiece in the room where they did the teas.
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