I am very happy that I have finally been to the Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens. They sounded great in various magazine articles, and Roy Lancaster is a fan. They sit tucked into a valley behind Chesil Bank, protected from the winds by the lie of the land as well as shelter planting, and are close enough to the sea that hard frosts are rare. The planting is lush, exotic, and as jungly as you can get while still in Dorset and not the tropical forests of Borneo. There are lots of rare things, plants with huge leaves, pools and ponds, and areas of drought adapted sun lovers at the top of the hill where the light and wind are strongest. It has an absolutely magical atmosphere, the cafe does good cream teas, and well behaved dogs are allowed on a tight lead. We don't have a dog, but I think they add to the ambience.
I found a gardener who was willing to be interrupted from his work in order to tell me about the soil, which is an odd outcrop of acid laced with iron ore among the predominant limestones of the Jurassic coast. I thought it had to be because otherwise how did they grow all those species rhododendrons? He also identified a succulent carrying the magnificent remains of a twelve foot flower spike as Furcraea. The spike was fascinating, carrying little miniature plants where each flower had been, plus a scattering of seed pods where it was giving sexual reproduction a go as well. He told me it would die now it had flowered, which I guessed, and had taken twelve years to reach flowering size. They'll be potting up the babies for sale, for customers prepared to wait.
So Abbotsbury got top marks, ten out of ten for garden, refreshments and general all round helpfulness. Then we went to Mapperton, which I'd never heard of until discovering a link to it on a Dorset tourist website. The Systems Administrator, meanwhile, had picked up on a newspaper article, because Mapperton has just featured as Bathsheba Everdene's farmhouse in the latest film version of Far From the Madding Crowd. We haven't seen the film yet, but I can't believe they used the top part of the garden because it is a delightful 1920s Italianate creation, with a beautiful and dilapidated orangery added in the 1960s but which we guessed might have been rescued and recycled from some other property. The film money might come in useful for repairing it. As the SA said, the interwar period is surprisingly late to be building a garden of that type on that scale. It is absolutely lovely, and I can't understand why Mapperton isn't more famous among garden lovers. Maybe because nobody very famous lived there.
Beyond the formal gardens is an arboretum, with some rare and good trees, including a mature Tedtradium daniellii. I wouldn't have guessed its name, but the guide book said they had one, so I looked it up afterwards to see if the description matched the plant. The standard of garden maintenance is high in an unobtrusive way, so cultivated plants are allowed to spill out over the paving and very generous amounts of Erigeron karvinskianus have been left to seed into the steps and paving, but there are very few weeds, and enough dead heading to keep the borders looking spruce for September. And it turned out to be an RHS partnership garden, so I got in for free, and spent half my savings on a rooted cutting of a very pretty geranium with ruffled, rose pink flowers with a pale eye. We didn't have room for more tea, but could have had some if we'd wanted. Ten out of ten to Mapperton, with the proviso that we didn't test the refreshments, but my guess is they'd be good.
Nobody gets lucky all the time, and we didn't fare so well at our next garden. I had hopes of Kingston Maurward, another RHS partnership garden with National Collections of penstemon and tender salvia which I wanted to see. Their website said they were easily accessible from the A35, but they weren't signposted sufficiently far in advance, and the Satnav sent us up a tiny lane leading to an even smaller one signposted No Access To Kingston Maurward. When we eventually got there after a detour we found they were very close to the A35 indeed, so much so that you could hear the traffic clearly from the garden.
Kingston Maurward is the home of a college specialising in land based courses, and the gardens share the site with an animal park. The gardens consist of a restored 1920s Italianate (again, but on a much larger scale than Mapperton and without the latter's Arts and Crafts influences) formal garden superimposed on to an older Capability Brown style (ie not by Capability Brown) park. The garden approach lacked a sense of entrance, visitors being sent across a yard with full view of the goat pens and up a yew passage with a businesslike modern wooden gate half way along, and side view into a dilapidated herb garden. As we toured the main garden I sensed a desperate lack of resources to keep something of that size and degree of formality going, plus a moderately severe rabbit problem. Brave efforts had been made with planting in some beds, but would have looked so much better if anybody had had time to go round deadheading them regularly, while ivy twined perilously round some of the stonework and bramble stems grew through the yew hedges. The penstemon collection was largely over, which at least made me feel better that most of my penstemons have finished flowering by mid September, whatever the books say about late colour. Labelling in the salvia collection was sketchy, and the some of the architectural features were curiously disjointed, flights of steps leading straight on to steep grassy banks that didn't seem designed for walking on. I'm afraid Kingston Maurward only gets five out of ten tops, though looking on the bright side as it was another RHS partnership garden we only had to pay for the SA's disappointment while mine came free.
All was redeemed at Athelhampton. I'd seen an article in Gardens Illustrated, and made a note that it had good bones, and so it has. A series of garden rooms enclosed by the local stone are laid out within a horseshoe curve of the river Piddle. There are formal ponds, fountains (all working), topiary and clipped hedges (all healthy), pleached lime walks, understated but interesting planting, and a splendid Magnolia grandiflora up the front of the house, which had one great scented goblet within convenient smelling distance. The maintenance is superb and we saw as many gardeners as visitors during our (weekday, September) visit. The atmosphere is of calm, order and romance. It is shut on Fridays and Saturdays for weddings, though if I were invited to a wedding there I'd duck out of as much of the forced conversation with strangers as I possibly could and just wander round the garden. The cafe has been ingeniously tucked among some outbuildings so that you don't see the glass roof of the covered area at all. The cream tea came with good scones and a generous pot of cream (clotted, not whipped. If it's not clotted it doesn't even count as a cream tea).
We didn't buy a guide book because it seemed so heavily slanted towards the house (which we didn't go into) that it didn't add to what I'd already got in Gardens Illustrated. We were gently puzzled by the date of the garden, as all of the restrained, faintly rococo stonework seemed of a piece. Looking it up afterwards on Wikipedia I found that the reason for that is that it is much younger than the fifteenth century manor house, being laid out for an antiquarian owner in the early twentieth century. Heading for its centenary, then, but certainly not an historic renaissance garden. That doesn't matter, it is absolutely delightful. Ten out of ten for Athelhampton, or maybe 9.99 because there were no plant sales, and the cafe smelt somewhat of disinfectant. One review on Tripadvisor does say This was an awful place to visit, yeah good for wedding pics but not much else. But I am guessing they didn't much like gardens.
I wonder if for next year's holiday I should volunteer my services in an experiment to discover what happens to the human body if it lives entirely on cream teas for a week.
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