Right Place, Right Time

When it comes to gardengoing, as with so many things in life, timing is everything.

So a quick alert to mention that now is a good time to go to Great Dixter, near Rye - for the dahlias, as enthusiasts know. With autumn closing in, although it's 'game over' in many gardens, the place is still flourishing.

I have to admit I hadn't been that drawn by the idea of Great Dixter, put off by gardening programmes, books and articles fixated on the 'clashing colours' in the planting (which made me think of grisly Victorian bedding in parks). Although I shared the great Christopher Lloyd's devotion to dahlias, a flower looked down on by purists, another reason his garden wasn't top of the list for a visit was that it was a plantsman's garden, whereas at the time, I was more interested in design - crucially overlooking the fact that this was a garden designed by none other than Edwin Lutyens.
Inspired by news of an exhibition about Christopher Lloyd at the Garden Museum, and realising that I'd probably been missing something, I made plans for a visit last Easter before seeing the exhibition. But our long-drawn-out, cruel winter put a stop to that. The gardening diary on Great Dixter's website warned that the snowdrops had only just come up . . . So I went to see the exhibition instead and was charmed, moved and inspired by Christopher Lloyd's life and garden - and came away resolved to see the garden when the dahlias were out. Another motive for wanting to go then was that I'd developed an unsatisfied hunger to be surrounded by these flowers since the sensational avenue of dahlias that lined the tennis courts in Preston Park mysteriously disappeared not long ago.


When I finally made it to Great Dixter about a fortnight ago, one of the volunteer gardeners told me of her recent visit to Sissinghurst, where there wasn't much to see. As we surveyed the scene, fields of exuberant plants, it was obviously the opposite at Great Dixter. The dahlias and exotics beloved of Christopher Lloyd and so carefully looked after by Fergus Garrett and his team couldn't have looked better. And, as this helpful volunteer told me, the gardeners are still doing things to keep the place fresh, like moving and adding plants, for instance, in the long border.
A few more photos to whet the appetite. There's more to see than dahlias, of course - meadows, topiary (peacock topiary newly trimmed, left, with shears in the foreground - pruning starts in late August and usually takes till November to finish it, but then it'll hold until the end of summer again), a productive garden, with a bale of giant pumpkins at the entrance, the superb Lutyens layout, to name just a few other attractions. There's also the house, with its magnificent medieval hall and library where my eye was caught by books by Christopher Lloyd's friends. There were several titles by Derek Jarman, who was there a lot, a guide told me, since he lived in nearby Dungeness. I loved seeing a few locals rolling up less than an hour before closing time for a sundowner wander around the grounds.










The garden is open till the end of October, 11 to 5, the house, 2 -4 (Northiam, near Rye, in West Sussex: for more info, see www.greatdixter.co.uk).