The Great Garden Challenge - Anglesey Abbey

I like an easy life; the sun on my back, well-behaved weeds and a garden fitted with wall-to-wall perfect tilth. Instead I get iron-willed weeds and fifty shades of clay with a few bits of ironmongery thrown in for painful spade-jarring.

Digging clay isn't The Great Garden Challenge though; nor am I planning to scramble up and down mountains, camel it across The Sahara, or make some unspeakable effort on behalf of my abs. My challenge involves industrial quantities of tea, cake and gossip. For I have pledged to visit 50 gardens with 50 different people or groups of people in a year. Tough, isn’t it?

Sunshine and Viburnum

Training for this Herculean task has been demanding. Exhaustive research involving salivating over beautiful garden photos was taxing enough without the arduous trial runs I endured in order to hone the vital skills of packing supplies (money) and equipment (camera). 

Acer griseum

It hasn’t all been plain sailing: one friend was refused entry to a garden thereby rendering the visit invalid, and I missed a tour when my chickens were attacked by dogs just as I was about to leave the house. Then there is the ongoing issue of my garden-loathing offspring. When asked where she would like to go on holiday, my youngest child googled this: 

Is there any hope? 

On a positive note, The Great Garden Challenge is an opportunity to catch up with friends and meet other gardeners. A group of friends who live nearly 100 miles away from me came along for my first ever visit to Anglesey Abbey, where The Winter Garden is in full swing. 

Chimonanthus praecox 'Luteus'

The design of The Winter Garden makes inspecting little Iris, Crocus and Galanthus flowers or stroking the bark of Acer griseum so easy. The scent of the great swathes of Sarcococca growing by the path is stronger than ever thanks to the enclosed, sheltered nature of this area. It is as if the plants are coming to us, rather than us having to seek them out. So often we scatter our winter flowers around the garden, filling gaps hither and thither, but having them all cheek by jowl and sited by a path adds to the wow factor of these early beauties and it must be a flashing fast food sign for any pollinators on the lookout for sustenance. It is a lesson I will apply to my own garden. 

Rising to the challenge of visiting Anglesey Abbey's wonderful

 Winter Garden with dear friends (can't imagine why I'm laughing)

Unexpected turns in gardens are always good fun. I will never forget the first time I clapped eyes on the Desert Wash at East Ruston Old Vicarage and yelped with surprise (I am not the coolest, calmest garden visitor). At Anglesey Abbey, the way in which The Winter Garden path opens out into a grove of Betula utilis var. jaquemontii is a quieter, but nonetheless lovely surprise. There is an other-wordliness to this area and I am delighted to see that saplings have been planted to extend it. I am not sure what unexpected turn I shall plan for my garden; a patch of flint free soil would be surprise enough at the moment.

Betula utilis var. jacquemontii

So The Great Garden Challenge is underway. My brain is already reeling with ideas for my own garden and there is a long way to go. It was a lovely day out, but physically demanding on our jaws and we had to stop for no fewer than three coffee/lunch/tea breaks. Tough times indeed, judging by the big smiles on my lovely friends' faces. 

Anglesey Abbey http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/anglesey-abbey/

Holey Clogs, the Garden Museum and a Day Out with Matthew Biggs

One Mothering Sunday not many moons ago, my children asked me what I would like to do to celebrate my special day. “You can do anything,” they said and my eyes lit up as images of me clad in a maternal swooshing skirt and skipping hand in hand with my beloved brood of smiling, plant-loving children through swathes
of daffs passed joyfully through my idealistic mind “...except visit a garden.”
I clattered inelegantly back to earth and landed with an ungraceful thud.

The girls skipping through the daffs (yes, they were bribed)

I reminisce dewy-eyed on the good old days, when all I had to do was suggest a trip to a beach which just happened to be in close proximity to a garden I wanted to see and they would clamber unwittingly into the car, trailing their buckets and spades behind them. Over the years they have grown wise to my pathetic ploys and I am subjected to trial by teenager if I so much as utter the words “day out”.

Brunnera macrophylla 'Jack Frost' in the farmhouse garden

The wiser the children grow; the more creative I must become. Days out with dual interests work well, so long as my hidden horticultural agenda remains undiscovered. Many zoos have superb gardens; and do you think I would have driven my offspring all the way to Legoland had I not harboured a burning desire to ogle the landscaping? So you can imagine my excitement on hearing about an exhibition exploring the relationship between fashion and garden design at the Garden Museum in London. All I had to do was conceal any reference to gardens and I would have my day out. 

Bergenia 'Silberlicht' in the farmhouse garden

It is a fascinating exhibition, spanning centuries of design from the use of botanically accurate images of flowers on clothing during the 1600s to Valentino’s spring/summer 2013 couture collection. Apart from the jaw-droppingly beautiful clothes, I particularly enjoyed a collection of paintings featuring gardeners at work. Gardeners were once such a source of pride that they were painted. Imagine! I would certainly need some new clothes if I were to be captured on canvas doing my mulching. 

My least holey clogs after years of mulching

This leads me to one of the questions raised by the exhibition. "How did people dress to garden, or to visit gardens?" The 18th century landscape movement may have given rise to a new style of dressing, which eventually developed into the outdoor clothing we see in glossy magazines, but I am not altogether convinced that this stylish ideal holds much relevance for real gardeners with brittle nails and that half moon sun strip around the midriff which never seems to fade. In any case, we know what we wear to garden these days, as we have already chewed over the issue of gardening clothes here: 
http://thegardeningshoe.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/swishing-for-gardeners-and-garlic-bath.html

Crocus tommasinianus proving its value to wildlife
 in the farmhouse garden

When it comes to visiting gardens, twenty-first century style choices can be astonishingly diverse and bewilderingly unpredictable. For example, there was a time when I might visit a garden sporting beach clothes accessorised by sand, seaside buckets and spades. These days however, I might dress as if I were on the verge of accompanying my teenage children to a music festival, but got lost en route and found myself visiting a garden. Ahem.

P.S.  Update on the children... After the initial horror of finding themselves duped yet again into a garden-based day out, they relaxed and enjoyed the exhibition. The level of forgiveness will be assessed on Mothering Sunday later this month. You never know, they might be reading this and decide (completely without any hinting from me at all) to treat me to a day out with Matthew Biggs.
http://www.gardenmuseum.org.uk/page/mothers-day-in-the-garden-with-mathew-biggs-30-03-14 

Information about the Fashion and Gardens Exhibition can be found on The Garden Museum website:  http://www.gardenmuseum.org.uk/page/fashion-and-gardens

The Great Escape.... Gardener Style

Is it any wonder that gardeners love visiting gardens? Other people’s plots provide us with inspiration, confidence boosters, tea, cake and shopping opportunities. We return home fizzing with ideas and cradling the must-have plants which leap into the trolley we unwittingly drag behind us whenever we enter a plant sales area.

The Exotic Garden at East Ruston Old Vicarage

We all have our favourite kind of garden. I particularly enjoy newer gardens because I like to return and see them as they mature. I have visited the garden at East Ruston Old Vicarage over many years and have delighted in watching it develop. On a recent tour I was intrigued to spot a patch of bare soil and an array of splendidly funky obelisks. A plot under construction is the gardening equivalent of a cliffhanger and one thing is certain: I will be back to see how these borders come along. 

There are exciting developments at Holkham Hall too, where the 6.5 acre walled garden is being renovated. This year, gardeners and volunteers have planted in the region of 5,500 plants which are already attracting plenty of pollinators. Holkham Walled Garden has a blog*, so even if you are unable to visit, do follow the progress of this ambitious project. 

Arena of Plants, Holkham Hall

Piet Oudolf's Millennium Garden at Pensthorpe underwent extensive work in 2009 to re-establish two-thirds of the garden and look at it now!

Arranged in large groups  - don't think threes; think thirty-somethings - this is high-impact planting for humans and wildlife alike. It is not the only garden at Pensthorpe;  Julie Toll's Wave Garden is a serene and tranquil space and the Wildlife Habitat Garden is a lesson in providing for the needs of butterflies, bees, dragonflies, damselflies, amphibians, reptiles, beetles and bats. 

Common Blue Butterfly at Pensthorpe

There is something reassuring about seeing other gardeners gardening. When I visited East Ruston, Alan Gray was planting Sedum; at Holkham, volunteers were weeding; and at Pensthorpe, there was a gardener toiling in the Millennium Garden. To non-gardeners, the concept of a gardener taking a day out to a garden to watch a gardener garden might sound a bit like a cross between a busman's holiday and a bad tongue twister, but we return from these gardeners' getaways raring to tackle the weeds, or tweak a planting scheme and create space for the plants which slipped so cheekily into our shopping trolleys. 

 One-year-old border in our Farmhouse Garden 

We have a lot of landscaping work ahead of us at the farm and since this is our soon-to-be courtyard garden (I hope your imagination is firing on all cylinders), I am going to be in serious need of inspiration, confidence boosters, tea, cake and shopping opportunities.

Perhaps it's time for another day out.

* http://holkhamwalledgarden.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/the-arena-of-plants-arena-of-plants.html?utm_source=BP_recent
http://www.pensthorpe.com
http://www.e-ruston-oldvicaragegardens.co.uk