Away From It All

I realise it's been a while since I posted anything. But I went to a garden yesterday and, two weeks ago, took in three in a weekend. So it's not for lack of material, or inspiration, since yesterday was Kew and the earlier trilogy consisted of Sussex Prairies garden, a friend's place on a Brighton hill-top, featured in the National Gardens Scheme and Garden Gadabout, and Glyndebourne. About a month ago, I went to Nymans, in East Sussex - so that's five yet to write up . . .

Gardengoing can become more than mildly addictive. Until yesterday's trip to Kew, I was feeling withdrawal symptoms (it had been a fortnight since my last excursion). Be warned - once you get in the habit of going to gardens, you could find yourself becoming a little enslaved to their pleasures. Yesterday, I gave in to the urge to go in search.

I'd been meaning to see Kew again for a while, and my whirlwind tour happened to coincide with a talk I'd hoped to make, so it was double whammy: a wander round a great garden and an enthralling talk by wild orchids world expert Professor Mike Hutchings (more on this in a later epistle). And, after a lengthy absence from new and strange outside spaces, going to Kew was double the pleasure of a usual garden visit.

So what's kept me? The usual - deadlines, followed by more deadlines. I have to admit that catching up on these postings today, though a pleasure, is partly motivated by a kind of internal deadline. Talking with a friend lately, when asked how often I post something, I said about every two weeks. But posting dates on Blogger are there for all to see, and it's been nearly a month. So to stay credible, I'll try not to let it slide again . . .

I also mentioned that I'd left it so long before writing about the latest places I'd visited that they'd really all be virtual gardens by now - after last Wednesday's rain and gales, they'd have all blown away.

With five gardens to report on, I thought that the next few postings after this would more closely resemble slide shows than the Burroughsesque routines to receivers I promised at the outset. Contrary to my initial plans, however, this next has ended up as a lengthy posting, maybe making up for lost time.

So cut to the chase. First off the blocks is the magnificent Nymans, which you can't easily skip through.

A number of promptings led me to Nymans at the end of September. A glaring omission that I hadn't yet been, I realise. But when it comes to gardengoing, I'm a late developer. As with most places I go to, Nymans came my way through recommendations. In an interview with "Sussex Life" earlier this year, Andy Sturgeon singled out Nymans and Great Dixter as two great Sussex gardens to visit for their plantsmanship.

A friend and fellow National Trust member had urged me to go to Nymans more than once (incidentally, we've got a date to see Standen together, at some point, d.v.). And then the clincher was when a conversation with another garden devotee (it's no coincidence that this was over lunch on a beautiful lawn on one of our Indian summer afternoons in early September) touched on Montpellier (a friend of hers had told her of a masked ball she'd been to there that summer - confirming my suspicions that it's definitely a place to be . . .), Giverny and Nymans, and I took away from this that while Nymans is lovely in the spring for fritillaries (in the grassy areas in the Wall Garden), you can go at different times of the year. That sealed it for me. Only a matter of time, I thought.

The last Saturday in September - it was a gorgeous day, and while the chores needed doing, I couldn't face them. I brought my parents, and we arrived at 2. Great timing, as a tour was just starting. I'd been looking forward to my picnic, hastily made before I set out. At the end of a working week and start of the weekend, I couldn't face a possibly slow-moving tour. My parents were delighted to catch it, though, and later told me their guide was wonderful . I'll have to go on one on a future visit, when I've plenty of time . . .

So I left them to be happily educated in the knowledge of plants and colourful stories of its owners (the house was famous for its bohemian parties, so I heard later) while I had a picnic in the sunshine, looking out over the most beautiful views of the countryside. And then I could wander at will, now and then dropping in on the tour, and checking up on my parents, hearing snippets about the place's talented former residents (so as not to appear rude, I mentioned that I'd really come out for a walk that day . . .).

Later, my father told me what they'd learned about the planting in the Wall Garden ("the heart of Nymans", according to the guide book, and the first phase of the garden laid out by Leonard Messel): plants from South America, mainly from Chile, line the south-facing wall; opposite are plants from the Himalayas. I'll have to investigate that next time.

Everywhere you looked, the planting was clearly superb. Later, I showed some of my camera phone snaps to a lady in the nursery shop who enthusiastically identified a few things for me.

The exquisite flowering shrub at the top of this page and above features on the website for Nymans: Eucryphia, from South America and Tasmania. I thought I wouldn't see it when I visited. A slightly defeatist attitude, perhaps - too late for anything that spectacular, I'd imagined. So it was quite a thrill to come across it, by accident. Surprisingly, maybe, the lady at the nursery hadn't seen the actual flower herself but confirmed that it was indeed the same as that on the website - and she had heard that this flowering shrub lined the paths on the way to the house, where I'd found it. As I've since discovered, it flowers in late August - the advantages of round-the-world planting, again . . .

We were urged to come back in May since they all "wait and wait" for a special magnolia to flower at that time. Good to know that the best is yet to come . . .

Meanwhile, here's the enormous magnolia growing on the side of the house that's now in ruins, along with banana trees:

Some of the plants in the formal gardens surrounding the house had evocative names: there were borders of a Salvia cultivar called "Hot Lips" in the dovecote garden (the close-up below shows something of the exuberance of this flower);


A couple of action photos. A little girl running along a path, below right: you can see her behind the pot, looking as if she's in it.

I just missed catching a dove in mid-flight above a lavender border, which, as you see below, is neatly terminated by the dovecote built into a wall. As a substitute, below left, a dove crowning the pinnacle.

What really made my visit was when I recognised the viaduct panorama that I usually see from the train, just after leaving Haywards Heath station on the way to London. This is one of the first glorious views you see as you walk down the huge slope of lawn towards the lime avenue (see photo, below right). When I was trying to capture this, the clouds massed, so it's hard to spot, but, if you zoom in, you can see a train crossing the bridge.






And what a lime avenue! Close up, the leaves are translucent in the sunlight, and you appreciate that these splendid trees have wonderful sound effects: the leaves make the most gentle rustling sound in the breeze. (Fragment of conversation overheard earlier: a lady remarking that Nymans was one of the few gardens where you couldn't hear any traffic.) It really brought home why limes were the choice of kings - avenues of this royal tree were planted in princely gardens. Examples include avenues at Theobalds, an auxiliary palace, by order of William Cecil, Elizabeth I's chief adviser, under the direction of John Gerard, and St James's park by order of Charles II and directed by Le Notre.

That you could hear the sound of the leaves was something in itself - especially considering the huge car park was packed to capacity that day. Also, despite visitor numbers, the grounds weren't in any way overcrowded. The only busy places were the cafe (after an hour's wanderings, I had a reviving Earl Grey tea and lavender scone outside) and, in second position, the shop.

On the way to the lime avenue, crossing the meadow, you pass the pinetum - astonishingly, only two giant redwoods from the original pinetum (which was horse-shoe shaped and dated from around 1895) survived the Great Storm of 1987. The new pinetum was planted in 1990, again in the shape of a horse-shoe . . . On that note, though obviously there's the logic of reconstruction in keeping the same shape, I couldn't resist thinking better luck next time, or at least, here's hoping, given the vagaries of our current climate. While a hundred years isn't a bad innings, it was very sad to think of so many beautiful ancient trees being decimated in a single night.


In the grounds, you come across various attractions and marvels, such as this extraordinary tree with fruit like raspberries and a giant redwood (close-up of the soft, velvety bark below)












and conceits such as topiary sculptures. What looks from a distance like Salvador Dali's Mae West lips sofa is, close up, a yew basket.
A stone figure in the undergrowth seems oddly lifelike, at first (see right).




So, on with the slideshow - a few shots of the formal gardens surrounding the house, with their clipped hedges, gravel paths, pots, ornamental trees and striking topiary; the "lion" gate pictured above, leading up to the house.



















On the way to the nursery you pass the rose garden: here, a startlingly vivid pink rose (right), and another with beautiful dusky red rosehips (below).




In the nursery on the way back, we picked up three David Austin roses and a couple of extraordinarily delicate white flowering euphorbia ("diamond frost").

Our last destination was The Royal Oak, in Poynings, at the foot of the Downs - an amazing location (there's also a lovely garden). Now for the "confessions of a terrible daughter" finale: my parents then told me that it was their anniversary. I shoulda known - unexpectedly, my mother had texted me mid-week to ask if I was free on Saturday in case we could see "All My Sons" (turned out to be sold-out, no surprise) or else Sunday they were thinking of going up to see the Picasso exhibition. I didn't think to ask what the occasion was . . . Anyhow, they said they hadn't told me, not wanting me to worry about a card or present, and they'd had a great day at Nymans - had driven past it numerous times without knowing it was something special.

The roses were a souvenir and present from my father to my mother (early that week they would plant them in a new circular bed under an apple tree). We celebrated with a Guinness (my father), white wine (my mother) and a Sagres (Portuguese beer: me) before heading back to Brighton to continue the festivities.

A last image from Nymans - a beautiful low-growing yellow flower ("campanile") I spotted on the way back through the grounds.








Next posting - Sussex Prairies garden, with links to Glyndebourne and Kew

Garden Alert: Sussex Prairies opening

Just a quick alert to say that Sussex Prairies, near Henfield, are open to the public this Sunday for the last time this year (visits by appointment at other times). I'd heard about this garden about a year ago via Sussex Gardens Trust and had meant to go on one of their visits there last September. The garden is described by its creators Paul and Pauline McBride as "the biggest naturalistic prairie garden in Sussex and one of the biggest in the country".


Then yesterday evening I heard about the place again from some fellow gardengoers who'd been there this September and loved it. What caught my attention was when they mentioned that the prairie planting was cut through with vistas. Though it was late in the year, they said there would still be quite a lot to see, and even flowers such as alliums that might have gone over would be sculptural and still impressive (though if I make it next weekend, I'll definitely plan a return visit mid-summer for the full technicolor experience).



This Sunday 24th is the second time they're opening this month and, as far as I can see, the last public opening this year - in the wake of a feature on Gardeners' World last Friday 15th. On their website, they promise visitors "a great selection of home made cakes and hot or cold drinks served on our terrace overlooking the garden" (http://www.sussexprairies.co.uk) .

For the BBC Gardeners' World feature on the garden, go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00vdjj8/Gardeners_World_2010_2011_Episode_26/

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).

The French Connection

Le Jardin des Plantes, Montpellier

A Midi Oasis

Bienvenue aux amateurs de jardin!

I'm chasing a few deadlines so the next few postings will be more like bulletins for now and probably a bit rough around the edges. But gardens are racking up like cards in my hand - it's time to play a few. Trimming and pruning can wait a while.

Last week I spent a few days in Montpellier. Other holiday plans had fallen through for unforeseeable reasons, but I managed to book something a couple of days beforehand. At first, I'd thought of going to Marseille by Eurostar but, with only a short break to play with, the 7-hour journey wasn't the best option. An hour and twenty minutes after take-off from Gatwick, we were in Montpellier.

Une lumiere couleur

The heat struck us first - washing over and through you like a forcefield. And then the sunlight glowing on the runway and irradiating the palm trees and flowering shrubs lining the roads into town. Van Gogh and Gauguin came to mind - on the second to last day of our stay, we went by TGV to Sete where there was a Dufy exhibition at the Paul Valery museum (gardens surrounding the museum opposite). Dufy's South of France paintings are lit up with that azure and golden light - yet in the exhibition notes there were a few quotations from the man himself acknowledging its magnetic quality while distinguishing it from a kind of illumination even more essential for a painter:

A suivre la lumiere solaire, on perd son temps. La lumiere de la peinture, c'est tout autre chose, c'est une lumiere de repartition, de composition, une lumiere couleur.

Le peintre a besoin d'avoir sans cesse sous les yeux certaine qualite de lumiere, un scintillant, une palpitation aerienne qui baigne ce qu'il voit.

[Apologies for lack of accents as couldn't track these down on Blogger, and pasting in Word documents brings up 'typescript error' . . .. On the subject of glitches, just to mention that unpredictable font sizes are courtesy of the ghost in the machine.]

Heroes of the Plant World

Maybe it was this year's Van Gogh exhibition at the RA that put the idea of going to the South in my mind. Another part of Montpellier's appeal was that it featured in the lives of the sixteenth-century herbalists and botanists I'd spent years reading about: in particular, two botanists trained at the university's distinguished medical school, de l'Obel (after whom the lobelia is named) and de l'Ecluse, who influenced John Gerard, gardener to Sir William Cecil and so ultimately helped shaped English gardens and botany. (Incidentally, in the next century, the magnolia would be named after another Montpellier medical graduate, Pierre Magnol.)

De l'Ecluse translated an influential herbal by Dutch botanist Dodoens, which appeared in English in 1557, translated, in turn, by Henry Lyte; some think that Gerard based his famous Herbal on de l'Ecluse's translation of Dodoens. There was another botanical domino effect when de l'Ecluse went on to found the first botanic garden at Leiden, bringing his collection of tulips with him and helping to initiate 'tulip fever'.

From the middle ages onwards, the area around Marseilles was both the gateway to the south, in terms of trade, and renowned for its health-giving properties, resulting in a high concentration of merchants and doctors and, in turn, boosting Montpellier's School of Medicine.

The Jardin des Plantes is the oldest botanic garden in France, dating from 1593. Henri IV commissioned his physician Pierre Richer de Belleval, known as the 'father of scientific botany', to create a space modelled on the garden in Padua, laid out in 1545 (the earliest botanic garden was created two years earlier, in Pisa). Montpellier's botanic garden was the prototype for the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris, 1623 (England's first botanic garden, at Oxford, was created in 1621). Instead of dried samples, students were able to study real plants as materia medica - and in glorious surroundings . . .

Luxe, calme et volupte

The garden is huge in scale, covering 4.5 acres. It's also free and open late - till 8 - and, after experiencing the mighty heat of the Midi the day before, which drove everyone, even the locals, into the shade, we thought that by around 7 it would be cool enough to enjoy exploring the place. We made our way there by tram, after spending a day at the beach. On the way, though, it was still so warm that I thought we might just want to sit and read in the shade - as do many of Montpellier's students.

But as soon as we entered the garden, it was just a pleasure to walk along the avenues and paths, and our books weren't needed - like perfect days at the beach where you bring something to read, but it's enough to look and listen to the sea and enjoy the sunshine.

I've run out of time to write much more but just to mention some highlights: myrtle hedges in various stages of being sculpted into shape, enclosing palm trees;



the perfect balance between trees and stonework (classical-style arches and wide stone walls and benches); rows of huge terracotta pots on pedestals;




an avenue of cypresses;



a lotus pond backed by an orangerie and conservatory, with enormous flowers with palest pink satin petals and bizarre showerhead-like seedpods;






students reading and writing on a little hill, stretched out on wide stone walls beneath a dense canopy of trees;
a bamboo forest;
a monumental greenhouse in the process of being restored;
the calm in the air, sweet scent of leaves, deep, gentle light and pellucid colours.
Last, but not least, a hexagonal herb garden divided into a symmetrical pattern of small beds each planted with a single species (an arrangement modelled on Italian botanic gardens).
An exotic tree stands at the centre: sapindus mukorossi, from China.

About twenty minutes before closing time, the headgardener took to his bicycle, furiously ringing his bell, hurtling along the paths like a man possessed (you can just make him out in the photo below, whizzing across at the top of the picture, about a third of the way in from the left), in huge contrast with the leisurely people, some strolling arm in arm, making their way out.


We were among the last to leave, around ten to eight (it was so lovely I could easily have stayed longer), and, although he looked tired and a little fraught after his high-speed circling of the garden - I joked with him about warning people to leave 'a toute vitesse' - he was happy to talk to us about the history of the garden and generously tried to look up details of a tour, but unfortunately the last for the season had taken place the day before. Next time . . .

Lastly, it was something to see beautifully engraved quotations by Paul Valery lining the paths. Here's the first, about the perfect time of day to visit the garden:

Le moment le plus agreable dans l'allee Cusson: de dix heures du matin a midi. C'est un admirable lieu de lecture cette allee sureleve au coeur du Jardin des Plantes entres deux murs de verdures variees.

A great place to read - a raised walk between two green walls - perhaps Valery meant the shaded path up a flight of steps where we'd met students lounging (and doing a little reading and writing while they were at it).

And the second:










Plants, people, poetry - what more could you ask for?


Next routine: more exotica, at Great Dixter

A suivre . . .