It only rained lightly this morning, and I took the opportunity to clean out the annexe to the chicken house where the hens are supposed to lay. Only the old lady hen is on-lay at the moment. The new little hens haven't started yet, nor have they started roosting on the perch at night. Instead they all sleep crammed into the egg box, which means that they crap in it. Hens must be instinctively hygienic creatures, and the old lady hen will not lay in the egg box if it gets mucky. I am hoping that the Speckledies will discover how to roost like grown up chickens fairly soon, since it is a nuisance to have them shitting in the egg box. They are having a dismal time of it in this weather, with no free ranging in the afternoon, and nothing much to do but shuffle between the sodden straw in their run, and the chicken house. Chickens enjoy sunbathing, by the way, when there is any sun.
Then, as it was still only raining a bit, we went to see Olivers garden on the south side of Colchester, open today and tomorrow for the National Gardens Scheme. Lots of new houses have been built on that side of town, on what was MoD land. Turning off the new roundabout down Olivers Lane, within seconds you have entered a different world. It's a single track lane with passing places, fields on either side, and a livery stables. Two young women were riding down the lane ahead of us, one bare-back on a fat brown pony with a cream coloured tail. At the end of the lane lies the Roman River, its flanks lined with poplars, bronze new leaves unfolding. Towns that stop abruptly at the countryside are not the sole province of the north.
Olivers was looking very nice. I heard the chap organising the (badly signposted) car park telling the couple ahead of us that this was the last year they'd be opening. I don't know if that means for the Yellow Book Scheme, or at all. They're open tomorrow as well, so seize the moment while you can (taking an umbrella). There is a gravel turning circle in front of a plain, handsome red brick eighteenth century house, with a flower bed in the middle, currently home to a cheerful mixture of tulips and wallflowers. There is a plant stall, where I snapped up a well-branched black aeonium for six pounds (I have some cuttings in the conservatory, but they were struck very late and it has been cold in there all winter, so they aren't looking great).
You go through a gate in the wall into the main garden. In front of the house is a large terrace, paving reassuringly uneven and furniture cheerfully mismatched. There is a box parterre (new growth slightly frosted. Our box at home is the same) filled in with a really good display of tulips and wallflowers. They were serving teas in a charming Gothick timber arcade at the end of the house, though we didn't have any tea, because we'd gone before lunch to miss the worst of the forecast rain. A huge lawn sweeps down towards the Roman River, giving excellent views out over an un-built on and unspoiled landscape. On the right hand side of the garden are big curving borders and a yew corridor with planting bays along one side. Euphorbias, tulips and crown imperial fritillaries are looking good now, and there is more to come later. On the left hand side of the garden are two big ponds, stream fed, and beyond the stretch of mown lawn the grass is left to grow long, with paths cut through it, currently studded with cowslips.
The formal garden is fenced, as various notices put it, to keep the dogs in and the rabbits out. Gates in the fence let you through into a wood, which is a sheet of bluebells. There are some azaleas and rhododendrons, and some nice exotic trees. I noticed the peeling bark of Prunus serrula. But the real point at this time of the year is the bluebells. They are such an intense shade of blue. The woodland area is larger than I remembered from my previous visit one July, when I suppose it was not doing very much. The land gathers into a little valley, lined with bluebells, with a stream running along the bottom, with the leaves of iris and what might have been giant hogweed. I'm not that well up on umbellifers, but I didn't touch it to be on the safe side. It had bristly stems and didn't look like a plant you'd want to stroke.
There is a nice summerhouse among the formal borders, based on a William Kent design at Rousham, which echoes the covered arcade at the other end of the house, and some artworks around the garden and in the wood (along with memorial tablets to Dido and Homer, presumably dogs). I'd have liked to see a couple more statues, one to act as an eye catcher when seen across the garden from the yew walk, and another as a punctuation point at the end of one of the paths cut into the long grass.
A handout told us that the soil is mostly thin sand with bands of clay, which is what we have at home. We share storms and rabbits with them as well, and a disinclination to use much in the way of chemicals. Olivers is a much larger and grander garden than ours, with a house to act as backdrop which is in a different league, but one of the things I like about visiting private gardens is that they give some ideas about what can be achieved on a domestic scale. Gardens run as businesses, with full-time staff and eager horticultural trainees, or with the resources of major charities behind them, can be interesting and beautiful to visit, and there is always lots to learn, if you keep your eyes about you, but for inspiration for gardening at home visiting good private gardens still on a (large) domestic scale has a lot going for it.
By the time we left the owner, Gay Edwards, had taken over as ticket seller, and she hailed us cheerfully, as if she recognised me from my place of work (which is possible), but she may just have beautiful manners. I congratulated her on how good the garden looked, and commiserated that the weather was so unkind. It is a very nice garden, and I was pleased to go and support it, particularly if this is their last year of opening. It is such a pity that the weekend is so wet and grim. So many gardens are opening for charity, and I can imagine the work that has gone into planning things like pots of tulips since last autumn, and all the extra bits of planting being finished somehow in the past six months, and the last minute edging and weeding, as well as the friends and relatives roped in to help with the plant stall, and cakes, and car parking. And then if it pours hardly anybody will come. There are a couple of woods near us opening too, for the bluebells, to raise money for their respective churches, and as we drove home we saw a pair of cars with sopping wet white ribbon fastened to their bonnets, so people's weddings are being rained on as well.
Showing posts with label garden visit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label garden visit. Show all posts
Saturday, 28 April 2012
Sunday, 15 April 2012
a garden visit
We went to see the garden at Boxted Mill, which was open in aid of the National Art Fund. The flier promised a riverside walk with daffodils, plus tea and cake, in the beautiful setting of the Dedham vale, which all sounded jolly nice. We had a little difficulty navigating the last stretch along tiny lanes, as my car doesn't have a Sat Nav, and the Systems Administrator's hand held Garmin kept changing its mind about the route it wanted us to take, but we got there, guessed correctly that the collection of cars parked in a field were something to do with the open garden, and sat in the car for five minutes to let the hailstorm pass.
The SA's researches on Google before we set out had led to a discussion forum about the porterage rights of canooists at Boxted Mill. There seemed to have been some difficulties and disagreements with the landowners in the past. My search had come up with a page on the website of the Dedham Vale Society complaining about an electricity pole at Boxted Mill which apparently dominated (and ruined) the appearance of the landscape. Boxted Mill was clearly a contentious place. As we walked back over the bridge from the car park (or field) to the mill we got a fine view of the electricity pole, which is spectacularly ugly, but only visible from limited vantage points. (The road bridge was built in 1900, and before that there wasn't one, just a foot bridge. Tow horses had to cross the Stour twice in the course of passing the mill. Those are my two bits of local history).
The garden walk did indeed take us along the banks of the Stour, and there were lots of daffodils, growing in lush grass. Some clumps were labelled, and few of them were names I recognised. I'm not a daffodil buff, but my guess is that quite a few of them aren't currently available for sale, or not easily. Some had gone over already, but many hadn't, and it was a good display. Apart from the daffodils there were flowering trees, cherries, crab apples and Amelanchier, many labelled which is always a bonus, a couple of nice Acer griseum, and some recently planted Magnolia and other shrubs, all carefully mulched and fenced to protect against rabbits and other marauders. All were set among grass, which was left to grow long and already richly mixed with nettles and cow parsley. Many of the trees showed evidence of past careful pruning and shaping, and some had rambling roses trained up them which were actually going up them, unlike my 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' which always wants to go equally in all directions. I should say that a high level of horticultural skill and effort had gone into producing such an insouciant air of naturalness.
There was evidence of the strained relationship with the canooing fraternity in the form of notices indicating where they were supposed to enter and leave the river above and below the mill race, and instructing them that they must travel straight on through, and not stop to picnic, or wander about the garden. These were supplemented by several notices reiterating that it was a private garden and requesting visitors not to use it as a public lavatory. When we bought our house, one of the things we liked about the position was that it didn't lie on or even near any public right of way. It must be very nice to paddle the length of the Stour, and lots of people do, and should be allowed to, but it must be a pain to have them tramping through your garden, let alone relieving themselves in it.
The mill race itself was rather alarming, I thought, with the water rushing over the sill. We presumed that the house owners must have a close working relationship with the environment agency, and the mill race is all very carefully designed, but there is something frightening about the power and force of water. The mill itself has gone (there is a very spraunchy house with Gothick windows and a lovely conservatory, and a couple of the kind of curved bow window that builders dread having to repair), but the Tate has a painting of a mill building by John Nash dating from 1962.
The view up the river and across the valley, grazed by white and brown cattle, was pure Constable, and the field next to the garden was occupied by some Jacob sheep, which alternated between grazing and marching about as if they had a secret purpose. They had dark brown fleeces and white faces, and little white legs twinkling rather comically under the great round mass of brown wool. Some had horns, but some didn't. There were two white sheep, one white faced and one black, which held themselves slightly apart from the Jacobs.
The big architectural treat of the day was the waterworks just up the road. We glimpsed this through a hedge on the way there, but I had another car on my tail, and we gawped as much as we could on the way home, but it was mostly surrounded by a very solid fence. The waterworks was a piece of unabashed Modernism, presumably interwar, with peeling white paint blowing in the wind. It was an image straight out of the RA's Building the Revolution. The smaller buildings scattered around the site (pump houses? chemical stores?) were in the same style. It would have made the perfect set for a scene in a spy thriller. When I got home I spent some time trying to find out more about it, but without success. The whole site must surely be listed, as it's an extraordinary set of industrial architecture to have survived anywhere, let alone in the rural Dedham Vale (I originally said Suffolk, but thinking about it the waterworks must be on the Essex side of the border). I wish they had an open day. I'd love to go and have a proper look.
The SA's researches on Google before we set out had led to a discussion forum about the porterage rights of canooists at Boxted Mill. There seemed to have been some difficulties and disagreements with the landowners in the past. My search had come up with a page on the website of the Dedham Vale Society complaining about an electricity pole at Boxted Mill which apparently dominated (and ruined) the appearance of the landscape. Boxted Mill was clearly a contentious place. As we walked back over the bridge from the car park (or field) to the mill we got a fine view of the electricity pole, which is spectacularly ugly, but only visible from limited vantage points. (The road bridge was built in 1900, and before that there wasn't one, just a foot bridge. Tow horses had to cross the Stour twice in the course of passing the mill. Those are my two bits of local history).
The garden walk did indeed take us along the banks of the Stour, and there were lots of daffodils, growing in lush grass. Some clumps were labelled, and few of them were names I recognised. I'm not a daffodil buff, but my guess is that quite a few of them aren't currently available for sale, or not easily. Some had gone over already, but many hadn't, and it was a good display. Apart from the daffodils there were flowering trees, cherries, crab apples and Amelanchier, many labelled which is always a bonus, a couple of nice Acer griseum, and some recently planted Magnolia and other shrubs, all carefully mulched and fenced to protect against rabbits and other marauders. All were set among grass, which was left to grow long and already richly mixed with nettles and cow parsley. Many of the trees showed evidence of past careful pruning and shaping, and some had rambling roses trained up them which were actually going up them, unlike my 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' which always wants to go equally in all directions. I should say that a high level of horticultural skill and effort had gone into producing such an insouciant air of naturalness.
There was evidence of the strained relationship with the canooing fraternity in the form of notices indicating where they were supposed to enter and leave the river above and below the mill race, and instructing them that they must travel straight on through, and not stop to picnic, or wander about the garden. These were supplemented by several notices reiterating that it was a private garden and requesting visitors not to use it as a public lavatory. When we bought our house, one of the things we liked about the position was that it didn't lie on or even near any public right of way. It must be very nice to paddle the length of the Stour, and lots of people do, and should be allowed to, but it must be a pain to have them tramping through your garden, let alone relieving themselves in it.
The mill race itself was rather alarming, I thought, with the water rushing over the sill. We presumed that the house owners must have a close working relationship with the environment agency, and the mill race is all very carefully designed, but there is something frightening about the power and force of water. The mill itself has gone (there is a very spraunchy house with Gothick windows and a lovely conservatory, and a couple of the kind of curved bow window that builders dread having to repair), but the Tate has a painting of a mill building by John Nash dating from 1962.
The view up the river and across the valley, grazed by white and brown cattle, was pure Constable, and the field next to the garden was occupied by some Jacob sheep, which alternated between grazing and marching about as if they had a secret purpose. They had dark brown fleeces and white faces, and little white legs twinkling rather comically under the great round mass of brown wool. Some had horns, but some didn't. There were two white sheep, one white faced and one black, which held themselves slightly apart from the Jacobs.
The big architectural treat of the day was the waterworks just up the road. We glimpsed this through a hedge on the way there, but I had another car on my tail, and we gawped as much as we could on the way home, but it was mostly surrounded by a very solid fence. The waterworks was a piece of unabashed Modernism, presumably interwar, with peeling white paint blowing in the wind. It was an image straight out of the RA's Building the Revolution. The smaller buildings scattered around the site (pump houses? chemical stores?) were in the same style. It would have made the perfect set for a scene in a spy thriller. When I got home I spent some time trying to find out more about it, but without success. The whole site must surely be listed, as it's an extraordinary set of industrial architecture to have survived anywhere, let alone in the rural Dedham Vale (I originally said Suffolk, but thinking about it the waterworks must be on the Essex side of the border). I wish they had an open day. I'd love to go and have a proper look.
Saturday, 11 June 2011
a garden worth visiting
I took my parents to see the Spencers, at Great Yeldham. The S.A. and I went there once before with friends, for a folk concert that had good acts but not enough audience, and the grounds looked promising. Searching on the Red Cross open gardens website for somewhere to visit this weekend Spencers came up, and the description of the walled garden, not open when we went to the folk concert, sounded very nice. The whole garden turned out to be excellent, well worth the hour's drive to get there (which was a relief as it would have been rather embarassing if it had been dull, or horrid).
The house is Georgian, built around 1760, probably on the site of an older building, and sits in a pleasant park with some fine trees. There is a terrace and some foundation planting around the house, then the rest of the formal garden is separated from the house by lawn and trees, so that you are not aware of its existence until, like Mary finding the secret garden, you go through the door in the wall. Inside you find a gem, a charming, formal arrangement of beds packed with well-grown plants, and some really novel touches. After I got home I read the Spencers' website more carefully, and discovered that the gardens are still in the process of renovation following a master plan drawn up by Tom Stuart-Smith. That goes far to explain all, as the saying goes, since he is probably my favourite designer working today (it would be a tough call between him and Piet Oudolf). A lot of credit also goes to Spencers' gardeners, because the standard of cultivation throughout the whole formal garden is very high, far better than Knebworth.
A lot of the planting is uber cottage garden, with masses of foxgloves, old fashioned pinks (white with a split calyx so I guess 'Mrs Sinkins'. There are no plant labels anywhere), sweet williams, Aquilegia, peonies, snapdragons, herbs, and lots and lots of roses, including a magnificant climber trained in a dense mass over an opening in one of the hedges like a giant, pink-studded tea cosy. There are big stands of blue delphiniums (I now know from the website that they are the variety 'Lord Butler', named after Rab Butler who lived at Spencers until his death). The delphiniums topped 2m and were glowing with health; I have never seen such good ones outside of the great marquee at Chelsea. There is a wooden pergola covered in small flowered climbing roses and honeysuckle, a sundial made out of part of the old London Bridge, and a fabulous wooden greenhouse built at the same time as the house and said to be the oldest in Essex, stuffed with flowers.
The formal divisions of space are very Tom Stuart-Smith, such as the idea of putting the delphiniums in wide rows in long, narrow, parallel beds like something out of a botanic garden or Monet's garden at Giverney. The use of formal hedges to divide the space is also characteristic. However, there are very few grasses, apart from some Stipa gigantea, and the whole planting is so sympathetic to the Georgian house and very English parkland and surrounding countryside that any suspicion one might have that he just trots out a design formula each time would be banished at once. He was responsible for creating the stone terrace around the house, big random laid stone slabs of varying sizes, with lavender and Alchemilla mollis growing through the gaps, that looks as though it has been there for ever, and it turns out was laid in 1995. As you approach the walled garden from the house you go through a white garden, with white flowered shrub roses and (an inspired choice) white standards (I guess 'Iceberg') in long grass (a neat goosefoot mown through it) crammed with white oxeye daisies. The use of standard roses in the flowing grass and wild flowers is unexpected and beautiful.
In the walled garden is a restrained, very effective piece of planting I have never seen anywhere else. A large square is laid to white clover, humming with bees at this time of the year, and a mown grass path curves through it. Around three sides are four-tiered espaliered trees, with shining leaves I marked down as some sort of pear. Luckily I found a gardener to ask, and they are a pear, Pyrus calleryana 'Chanticleer'. They went in four years ago as maidens, and the gardeners have done all the training themselves. Normally you see this as an upright, vase shaped tree, but it turns out it will train beautifully. I found this a wonderful and restful area, and was very pleased to find a bench right at the back of a border, with slabs leading to it, where I could sit surrounded by foxgloves while looking at the geometry and the green. It produced a completely different response in a little girl, who ran round and round the path.
After the complicated pleasures of the walled garden, and the very nice Red Cross tea by the swimming pool (it said cream teas on the website, and turned out to be cake, but they had coffee and walnut so that was fine), we wandered through the woodland walk, and back across the park. The woodland is being planted up with shrub roses and other flowering woody things, and the walk takes you down to the river Colne, looking very small so far upstream, with a red lacquer Chinese bridge over it. The transition from bright and busy to green, shady and calm is a classic element of a good garden, I think, where space permits.
When I first looked at the Spencers website it appeared to me that the garden didn't open all that much to the public except for groups by arrangement, since they also use the house to host events and parties, but looking again more carefully there are some other open days coming up soon. They are open next weekend for the NGS, and are doing a couple of guided tours with lunch for £20 a head, and it looks as though they routinely open in the summer on Thursday afternoons from 2.00 until 5.00pm. Certainly there is an honesty box on the way in, which suggests there are or were regular openings at some point. Here is a link to their website so you can double check all these things for yourself, and it has nice photos on it too, so you can see what it looks like, since I didn't take any pictures: link to Spencers But I would say to everybody (especially those of you living in Castle Hedingham which is only just up the road!) do go. It is really, really good.
The house is Georgian, built around 1760, probably on the site of an older building, and sits in a pleasant park with some fine trees. There is a terrace and some foundation planting around the house, then the rest of the formal garden is separated from the house by lawn and trees, so that you are not aware of its existence until, like Mary finding the secret garden, you go through the door in the wall. Inside you find a gem, a charming, formal arrangement of beds packed with well-grown plants, and some really novel touches. After I got home I read the Spencers' website more carefully, and discovered that the gardens are still in the process of renovation following a master plan drawn up by Tom Stuart-Smith. That goes far to explain all, as the saying goes, since he is probably my favourite designer working today (it would be a tough call between him and Piet Oudolf). A lot of credit also goes to Spencers' gardeners, because the standard of cultivation throughout the whole formal garden is very high, far better than Knebworth.
A lot of the planting is uber cottage garden, with masses of foxgloves, old fashioned pinks (white with a split calyx so I guess 'Mrs Sinkins'. There are no plant labels anywhere), sweet williams, Aquilegia, peonies, snapdragons, herbs, and lots and lots of roses, including a magnificant climber trained in a dense mass over an opening in one of the hedges like a giant, pink-studded tea cosy. There are big stands of blue delphiniums (I now know from the website that they are the variety 'Lord Butler', named after Rab Butler who lived at Spencers until his death). The delphiniums topped 2m and were glowing with health; I have never seen such good ones outside of the great marquee at Chelsea. There is a wooden pergola covered in small flowered climbing roses and honeysuckle, a sundial made out of part of the old London Bridge, and a fabulous wooden greenhouse built at the same time as the house and said to be the oldest in Essex, stuffed with flowers.
The formal divisions of space are very Tom Stuart-Smith, such as the idea of putting the delphiniums in wide rows in long, narrow, parallel beds like something out of a botanic garden or Monet's garden at Giverney. The use of formal hedges to divide the space is also characteristic. However, there are very few grasses, apart from some Stipa gigantea, and the whole planting is so sympathetic to the Georgian house and very English parkland and surrounding countryside that any suspicion one might have that he just trots out a design formula each time would be banished at once. He was responsible for creating the stone terrace around the house, big random laid stone slabs of varying sizes, with lavender and Alchemilla mollis growing through the gaps, that looks as though it has been there for ever, and it turns out was laid in 1995. As you approach the walled garden from the house you go through a white garden, with white flowered shrub roses and (an inspired choice) white standards (I guess 'Iceberg') in long grass (a neat goosefoot mown through it) crammed with white oxeye daisies. The use of standard roses in the flowing grass and wild flowers is unexpected and beautiful.
In the walled garden is a restrained, very effective piece of planting I have never seen anywhere else. A large square is laid to white clover, humming with bees at this time of the year, and a mown grass path curves through it. Around three sides are four-tiered espaliered trees, with shining leaves I marked down as some sort of pear. Luckily I found a gardener to ask, and they are a pear, Pyrus calleryana 'Chanticleer'. They went in four years ago as maidens, and the gardeners have done all the training themselves. Normally you see this as an upright, vase shaped tree, but it turns out it will train beautifully. I found this a wonderful and restful area, and was very pleased to find a bench right at the back of a border, with slabs leading to it, where I could sit surrounded by foxgloves while looking at the geometry and the green. It produced a completely different response in a little girl, who ran round and round the path.
After the complicated pleasures of the walled garden, and the very nice Red Cross tea by the swimming pool (it said cream teas on the website, and turned out to be cake, but they had coffee and walnut so that was fine), we wandered through the woodland walk, and back across the park. The woodland is being planted up with shrub roses and other flowering woody things, and the walk takes you down to the river Colne, looking very small so far upstream, with a red lacquer Chinese bridge over it. The transition from bright and busy to green, shady and calm is a classic element of a good garden, I think, where space permits.
When I first looked at the Spencers website it appeared to me that the garden didn't open all that much to the public except for groups by arrangement, since they also use the house to host events and parties, but looking again more carefully there are some other open days coming up soon. They are open next weekend for the NGS, and are doing a couple of guided tours with lunch for £20 a head, and it looks as though they routinely open in the summer on Thursday afternoons from 2.00 until 5.00pm. Certainly there is an honesty box on the way in, which suggests there are or were regular openings at some point. Here is a link to their website so you can double check all these things for yourself, and it has nice photos on it too, so you can see what it looks like, since I didn't take any pictures: link to Spencers But I would say to everybody (especially those of you living in Castle Hedingham which is only just up the road!) do go. It is really, really good.
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