For many years we’ve enjoyed visiting NGS (National Garden Scheme) gardens in the UK. There’s a certain rhythm to a visit: notice a window in the diary, open the NGS app, search for gardens, reject gardens that we’ve visited before (unless they’re very special and need to be revisited) identify one that’s not too far away, drive to it in eager anticipation, take a long … Continue reading Open garden : Jardin ouvert
This time last year I downloaded an app called Top 9 which selects the best (not sure by what criteria) nine photos posted on Instagram during the previous year. I’m seeing a few people posting their Top 9 so I decided I’d revisit it. Unfortunately the app doesn’t want to play ball, just hanging and displaying the message “Doing some housekeeping …”. Its been doing … Continue reading My top 10 from 2020
A blissful midsummer’s weekend celebrating the best in garden writing I can’t remember when I first heard about the Garden Museum. I’ve been to a few of their wonderful events over the years, have supported Christopher Woodward’s sterling fund-raising efforts for development, and have become rather fond of the organisation and everything it stands for. One day, when I was clearly in the mood to treat … Continue reading The Garden Museum Literary Festival – a long weekend in Norfolk Part 1
For a number of reasons spirits have been sinking lower and lower. A voluntary task was becoming a seriously unsustainable burden. Work was ramping up in pressure (albeit exactly as expected as moving into a busy time). An unforeseeable crisis caused stress and heartache which isn’t going to go away. Capacity was at full stretch, I’d worked all through last weekend and many evenings over … Continue reading A winter walk at Wakehurst Place
There is a beautiful sense of counterpoint to our dual lives, each strand differing from, yet complementing, the other. Our lives in West Sussex are lived in a tiny modern house with a garden smaller than most people’s pools in south-west France. So we tend to go out garden visiting (Garden Bothering?) at the weekends when based in Sussex. Sometimes we will visit an NGS garden, … Continue reading Parham House Harvest Fair: a gloriously sunny day in West Sussex
Three summers ago while on holiday in the Dordogne with friends, before we thought of buying a property in France, we visited the gardens at Château de Marqueyssac, one of France’s Jardins Remarquable. I had read about the gardens, and seen Joe Swift’s * feature on Gardener’s World in October 2011, and determined that we must go. So the opportunity was perfect. Situated on a cliff … Continue reading Inspirations: Château de Marqueyssac
The Renaissance Gardener 