West Dean

There are so many things I want to share with what I am seeing, doing and learning but find it difficult to really get all of this information out. A lot of driving has been happening to visit different gardens during my time off from a busy work week that I find myself short on time to sit in front of the computer. The summer is different here too because not only is the weather wonderful here but the sun rises at 4:30 am and it doesn't really get dark until 10- 10:15pm. So if the sun is out, I am usually outside..........



The other week I was speaking with a fellow gardener while I was taking some Foxgloves, Digitalis purpurea, out of one of the garden beds. We started talking about how these plants are used in making certain heart medicines. Louise started to tell me about how back in the yesteryear's people would take leaves off the plant and chew them to self medicate their heart problems. -I must say that these plants are poisonous.... so please, I don't want anyone to hurt themselves...... just say no!- So I was told that one of the side affects of taking too much of these leaves was to have your sight go yellow. Louise said that Van Gogh, the painter, was known for having some heart ailments and took Digitalis leaves; maybe to the point of poisoning himself and researchers believe that this what might have been the cause of his "yellow period". These are the odd facts about plants and history that make sense.



Here is a more interesting in depth look at this:



www.psych.ucalgary.ca/PACE/VA-Lab/AVDE-Website/VanGogh.html







So while there are no sunflowers in this field I did find it inspirational enough to pull the car over and take a shot of while on my way to West Dean in Chichester, West Sussex. It is about a two hour drive west of Great Dixter. West Dean was the home to a man named Edward James, who was born into a privileged life and found himself to be a huge supporter of the arts, specifically Surrealism. He supported painters by purchasing their work (Dali and Magritte to name a few), set up a publishing house to publish the works of poets, and helped finance some ballet specifically Balanchine productions. He also created a large garden in Mexico that you might be familiar with called Xilitla, which has large temples and staircases running through the jungle and is completely covered in vines and ferns. He loved trees and plants and after he passed away he was buried in the Arboretum that is at West Dean. He was a real eccentric man and was a poet and writer himself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_James

West Dean is now a school for artists, craftspeople, conservators and restorers and is home to an amazing walled garden where there technique is almost next to none. The gardens are run by Jim Auckland and Sarah Wain, husband and wife, who turned the Victorian walled gardens around from decay into the glorious splendor that they are today. The fruit and vegetable gardens here are immaculate and the attention to detail in the way they grow everything is exactly how you would like to know that your food is being grown.
Here is inside the grapevine glasshouse, where the vines are trained up against the glass roof which will then let the bunches of grapes hang down once they start to mature. Notice how clean and orderly the glasshouse is.....
Here is a closeup of some of the vines. Note how they are all growing from one plant, and the thickness of the trunk.
Here is the Nectarine house where it is espaliered against the walls .

Here in the melon house, great precautions are taken against splashing water onto the plant to prevent foliar diseases. Note the raised level of the soil beds to help with quick drainage and how the empty plastic pots are used, pushed slightly into the soil, to help get water to the roots of the plant without splashing soil upwards again.

Outside in the walled garden you will see the orchard where all sorts of hard fruits such as pears and apples are grown. All of the trees are trained to grow in different shapes such as pyramids and circular forms that would help with air circulation to prevent disease and to make it easier to harvest fruit from.

Here is one of the fruit storage houses where they would put their harvests to keep for months after. They would line these shelves with apples and pears.

There were a dozen or so glasshouses in the walled garden which were surrounded by cutting gardens in one area. One of the large fig tree of cultivar 'Brown Turkey' in the glass house, again beautifully displayed, with their cacti and succulent collection on show outside.

Inside one of the many Victorian glasshouses, with a collection of many potted plants such as begonias, nepanthes, ferns and such. Each plant had gravel at the top of the soil level to help with watering, to help prevent the harboring and spread of disease.

Look how clean it is everywhere, the benches, the plants, the pots!! Nancy, who was my teacher in all things greenhouse related at school, would have been proud........

The lovely Pepper house, where every type you could imagine was grown. The aroma in here was so strong due to the heat of the sun. If you love peppers then look no further. They have a huge chili pepper festival here every year.

Here is one of the many vegetable beds filled with every type of Brassica possible. There were some heads of cabbage that were 2x the size of a basketball.

See.....

In a corner of the vegetable garden there was rhubarb being blanched (say it with me Liz!) in their cloches.

The view from the walled garden looking towards the glasshouses with the rolling hills beyond, which is where the arboretum was started.

These fields were at the base of the arboretum where there were sheep grazing everywhere.
One of the many picturesque bridges on the estate.
There was a road that led away from the school up into the rolling hills on footpaths, which took you through sheep pastures up to a 40 acre arboretum. It was full of exceptional trees and I saw a grove of Monkey puzzles which is always fun but my camera battery ran out of juice. It was a good thing though because now with digital cameras, we spend so much time taking photos that it is difficult to sometimes put them down and enjoy the moment rather than trying to capture it. And enjoy it I did.....

Somerset, Dorset whichever you may choose

Went to the South West area of England to go see some gardens and houses in the Somerset and Dorset area. I got to stay with a lovely woman who is a fantastic artist and lives in a very small town called Taunton. She lives in 2 old converted barns and has a very large walled garden attached to her house that she gardens in.

This was an exciting weekend because not only was I seeing new parts of the country, but I had to drive on the roads as well............ I am still here, so you can breathe now. :)

The view of her studio from the outside.

A bench gleaming from the sun in the meadow area of the walled garden, against the backdrop of the pink stone native to the area.

The sun setting in the studio side of the garden. You would have never have known you were in the middle of the village because the walls made the garden feel a lot more secluded than you were.

There is an organization called the National Trust here that helps secure and preserve old estates, gardens and parts of the countryside and coast. Once your a member you can visit any of their properties which are located all over England, and your pass gets you in everywhere for free. For me this is great because it gives me the chance to see unspoiled countryside, mature trees and gives me more of an understanding of the relationship between a house and it's surrounding gardens. Seeing National Trust properties puts a new spin on visiting gardens because of the sense of history behind each place and helps me get an inside look at how some of our greatest gardeners would think when putting these landscapes together.

After successfully navigating myself and Mark through multiple roads and roundabouts (These are circles that you drive around to get to where you want and are placed where multiple main roads intersect. It's great, if you can't figure out which road you need, you simply drive in the circle until you see the correct road sign. Much better than missing your exit and having to drive 10 miles to the next one to turn around.) . So after all of my driving excitement/fear we made it to a place called Killerton in Exeter, Devon.

Killerton is an 18th century house surrounded by parkland and some large gardens. You can tour the inside of these stately homes but unfortunately pictures are not allowed. But you want to see trees and plants anyway don't you?!

Here you have views of the neighboring sheep fields,


with a silhouette of the Cedar of Lebanon, Cedrus lebani where it's form can really be seen and appreciated.

One of the garden beds, which while they were planted nicely, it was the surrounding landscape that excited me.

The native oak , Quercus robur, cooling me off in it's glorious shade while sharing a tiny morsel of the view to come.

The view of the neighboring countryside from the top of the property. The colors and patterns of the landscape are reminiscent of a quilt, seamlessly pulled together and mesmerizing to look at. To see each field being a different color while being outlined and dotted with trees is something that I would never tire of.

The wild Foxgloves in bloom, Digitalis purpurea and the purple blooming ever present

Rhododendron ponticum.

Large mature Giant Redwoods, Sequoiadendron giganteum, towering well above my head.

When your given lemons, make lemonade right?
I am not sure how this tree wound up horizontal but instead of cutting it up and carting it away,

it was turned into a discreet sitting area.

This small church was connected to the grounds of the National Trust property. Each church you pass in England seems to have it's own charm and just begs to be looked at. The stonework is incredible and is usually surrounded by some pretty old trees. Here it was amazing to see the tree trained Wisteria in full bloom all along one side of the church. Again, the horticultural skills that are seen in England are just astounding.

-------------------

Then it was off to driving to Tintinhull house and garden which was another car ride away. This is a 17th century manor house which is surrounded by a walled garden made of up pockets of garden rooms.

Pelargonium ardens brightening up a planting niche.

There was a vegetable garden of substantial size which was lit up with a walkway of Nepeta 'Six Hills Giant'.

Then it was on to visit some other friends in Dorset which was about 2 hours away from where we were staying. The land started to change as we drove and more and more hills became present. I wouldn't call them mountains, they were really large rolling hills.

We all stayed with some friends, one being a girl I went to Longwood with named Jess. Small world huh? We got to see the estate they work on which was pretty impressive. No photos were allowed though.

The view looking down on the estate we just visited. The estate was enormous and was still relatively newly planted. You can see the Tilia tree allees that still have a few years until maturation. Seeing an estate at this stage was a real pleasure for me because you could see how the ideas were created and why they were created. These allees lead your eye from the house straight to the gorgeous rolling hills beyond.

Miles and miles of lush greenery for the eyes.

The road we walked up.

A wild flower meadow, with golden yellow buttercups and the red Rumex acetosa, competing for attention from the sweeping views beyond.

A
view from inside the glade of about 30 trees on top of the mountain. There was an obvious 10 degree drop in temperature in here which was a nice break from the sun and the view of the sun peeking through was like being in another world.

Making your way through the footpaths while sharing the fields with sheep is one thing, but with large cows that don't scurry off the walk when you come by can be a little intimidating......

The walk back with a not so bad view.

Jerusalem............................

I am happy to say that I got the Jerusalem Botanical Garden Scholarship!!!!!!!!!!! I will be starting in September!!

Making the Exotic......

We started planting out the Exotic garden now that the temperature show no sign of dropping during the night. Alot of succulents were pulled out of the glasshouses, cannas and dahlias that had been potted up and brought out of dormancy were brought to the garden and the bananas were freed from their 'bracken teepees'

The Exotic garden caused a bit of a stir when it was first planted in 1993 because it was originally an Edwardian rose garden that had been designed by Edwin Lutyens, the architect, and was created almost 80 years ago. Christopher Lloyd decided to make this change because he felt change was needed in that area of the garden and the roses kept getting plagued by replant disease due to lack of circulation from the hedges. Some visitors were in an uproar but Christopher Lloyd said, 'The noise of tearing old rose roots as they were being exhumed was music to my ears.' Some roses though were allowed to remain.

The view that you see, from my window, is looking at the garden from above, where it is surrounded by Yew hedges next to one of the original farm buildings.

Here is the large Tetrapanix papyrifira and the smaller silver foliaged Eucalyptus gunnii.

Phormium tenax with the still emerging Canna 'Durban'

The highlight of this garden is all of the interesting colors, shapes and textures of foliage and bright jewel colored blooms.

The blooms of this rose are mimicked underneath by the shape of the heads of Aenioum 'Zwartkop', which gives a cascading effect to the eye.

More foliage contrast....... And from what I have seen in photos and heard, as September approaches, the exotic garden is so lush that the paths turn into tunnels due to the amount of foliage. I will continue to share how it fills out....

And just to give a highlight of what has been going on in the Long Border, here are some of the reddish pink Lupines stealing the show at the bottom of the border.

And just to give a highlight of what has been going on in the Long Border, here are some of the reddish pink Lupines stealing the show at the bottom of the border.

Here is a Stipa arundinacea and the ox-eye daisies , Leucanthemum vulgare.

Looking through the Yew arch, the Barn garden is an intense array of colors at the moment.

Here are the stock beds that the nursery propagates from, blooming in all different shades. There are geraniums, Tanacetum niveum and the tall spikes of Verbascum speciosum getting ready to open bright yellow blooms.

Here in the stock garden bed you have Baptisia australis and Tanacetum niveum with the Oast House in the background.

The lovely Ladybird poppies are blooming intensely and look really striking against Miscanthus sinensis 'Cosmopolitan'.

The walls are in full bloom with Centranthes rubera and the self sown Erigeron karvinskianus, or Mexican daisy, which look like they pop out of every crack in the paving stones and stone wall.

I am having such a fantastic time here in England, and am loving Great Dixter in every way. I couldn't be happier. Keep your fingers crossed to because my interview with the Jerusalem Botanical Garden is tomorrow.