Category: Outing Reports

Set within the Isle of Purbeck, Holme was originally a fruit and dairy farm: now 15-acres are laid out to formal and informal landscaped gardens of great variety and complete with surprise and charm, as well as birdsong, a haven for relaxation.   Having written about the gardens in April 2025 I was surprised at how delightful this return visit was to be: Simon Goldsack’s gardening passion, as is his eye for detail and an intuitive sense of design, is[…]

Once a carrot field, Knoll Gardens have existed under different names and owners since the 1970’s.  In 1994, Neil Lucas took over the creative care of the current gardens and winning ten Chelsea gold medals.  With an ethos for matching ‘plant to the place’ the ornamental grasses combine with perennials, mature trees and shrubs in a naturalistic design, suiting sustainability and biodiversity.  Hence there are damp, dry, shaded and gravel areas to suit the changeable climate. A low maintenance and[…]

The dark green of trees and hedges contrast the pale dun of burnt land as July’s heat sets in. Rambling Cornish Cotehele, a Tudor manor house with cobbled courtyards and slabs of granite under slate, where volunteers care for 14 acres of garden and 12 acres of orchards.  Besides a medieval stew pond and dovecote, providing fish and fowl, there is a water mill and quay.  This bustled with vessels in 19th century, local industries having boomed on the banks of[…]

The weather and rhododendrons are ahead of 2025 by a couple of weeks, significant at Exbury, which has 200 acres of mixed herbaceous, contemporary, formal and woodland gardens bordering the Beaulieu River.  There is narrow-gauge steam railway finalised in 2001 by enthusiast Leopold de Rothschild and inspired by Aviemore Station in Scotland. The Rothschild dynasty started with a coin dealer in the Frankfurt ghetto with five sons, who spread throughout Europe in the 1800’s. Exbury House, a neoclassical mansion was[…]

A place of legend where the old and very young find somewhere that speaks to them through ancient walls, colour and design, foliage, or water flowing through the decades: to be glimpsed as a memory at a later age. From the Dean’s Eye, across Cathedral Green then over a draw-bridged moat, we hear of a garden prior to Bishop Jocelyn’s palace and camery, (medieval garden) created early in the 13th century. Later that century the chapel and one of the[…]

Mottisfont stands bold, then follow along to the priory’s cellarium and coffee strong, view a Mappa Mottisfont defining the hours and lands from the priory’s 1340 flourishing to the black death and decline. Across the sward a stone arched summer house, fit for assignations, is dwarfed below majestic trees. Boxed trees with much clipping to define, formal edging, hedging and a lime walk recalling columned cloisters, formality with urns and mown lawn give way to rewilding tinged red and shades[…]

A hot sunny morning, you would think it was June as trees have fresh leaves and the fields are coloured in a patchwork of brown to acid yellow and every shade of green, after heavy rain a couple of weeks’ ago.  Row cover glints on a distant ridge, a reminder that the ground is still needing to warm up, and that’s not the only place that needs warming, the coach has hyper air conditioning.   To the south flat fields gather[…]

The last garden visit of 2024 and guided by volunteer Mike King through Dartington Hall’s long and tempestuous history. In 1326 the Martin family enclosed a 100-acre deer park, still home to fallow deer, then Dartington was granted to Sir John Holand in 1388 by Richard II, his half-brother. A year after Sir John built a hillside manor house he was executed for treason by Henry IV. History then repeated itself with the estate passing between grants from the crown[…]

Deep mist and heavy rain, wellies left at home, after all it is July. Drip, drip, drip from the overflowing guttering and heavens above, in front of me is a sign about Compton Acres having the invasive Curly Waterweed, it was certainly watery but I couldn’t see many weeds!  Pippa took us on our walk through all the gardens with their many educational notices about protecting and conserving wildlife, birds and woodlands, marine plastic pollution and a happier one about[…]

The formal Edwardian Hestercombe Garden has been described as ‘Lutyens at his best’. Designed just before the First World War, a collaboration between Edwin Lutyens hard landscaping and Gertrude Jekyll, weaving her magic with soft planting: a plan of which she left pinned up in the potting shed and is still used for reference.  The Victorian mansion with its somewhat dour southern Victorian facade is in contrast to the gardens which reside below on three levels.  In the combe north[…]