In the Summer of Love, all beautiful people wore flowers in their long hair and everything went floral. But for the British gardening world, every season is a Summer of Love. In a land where so much conversation revolves around the weather, where a deep relationship with nature has been celebrated through the centuries by poets, painters, philosophers and kings and recited in the most familiar of nursery rhymes, this seems, well, only natural.
A seemingly insatiable appetite for all things botanical extends to TV and other media. BBC2’s hugely popular Gardeners World is in its Golden Jubilee Year, whilst Love your Garden, Garden Rescue and the Edible Garden are all massive hit shows. Gardeners’ Question Time has been pitting BBC Radio listeners against celebrity gardeners from village halls around the UK weekly since 1947. Vertical Veg, Guerilla Gardening, Real Men Sow and Potting Shed UK are amongst hundreds of dedicated magazines, websites and blogs.
The nation’s passion for plants thrives year round, but it’s a love with particular potency in the summer season. Is there anything more quintessentially British than our gardens in summer, fragrant with roses, lavender and jasmine; floribundant with hollyhocks, peonies and delphinia? The Chelsea Flower Show, Hampton Court Palace Flower Show, National Garden Competition and Shed of the Year, are ever-flourishing annual summer events. Newsstand magazines are awash with garden tips and treats, recipes for homegrown fruit and veg and ads for inventive garden paraphernalia.
If you’d like to share in the nation’s horticultural hysteria, you’ll find an infinite variety of wonderful gardens around the country open to view, from stately homes and castles to wildflower meadows, urban parks and neighbourhood allotments, all proud to show off their rainbow wares this summer.
Amongst our favourites are Wisley Gardens, Surrey, a magical paradise of the formal and the wild, Westonbirt Arboretum, Gloucestershire, with its matchless collection of trees and breathtaking treetop walkway, and Mottisfont, Hampshire, home to the national collection of old fashioned roses. In summer, it’s a vast bouquet of colour and fragrance displaying over 500 types of scented, climbing, rambling and bush. Add a romantic medieval house, art gallery and beautiful riverside gardens and you have the recipe for a total feast of the senses. Mottisfont also warmly welcomes children, with devoted wild play areas and plenty of space to run, play and bike.
We highly recommend a visit to remarkable Beth Chatto Gardens in Essex. In 1960, plantswoman Chatto took an overgrown wasteland of bramble, bog and dry gravel, and transformed it into inspirational gardens, using her successful mantra of “the right plant for the right place”. Lush themed areas include never-watered gravel gardens, splendid and serene water gardens and cooling canopied woodlands. There’s an imaginative programme of activities like Bee Safaris, Pond Detectives and Mini Beasts Rule days, a Wildlife Fair in August and a Great Pumpkin Hunt in October, a wonderful plant nursery and quaint tea room with homemade scones and tantalising cakes. Now aged 94, Beth Chatto still oversees her world famous and award-winning gardens, and can often be seen zipping about the grounds on her mobility scooter.
Bloomsbury fans will want to make pilgrimage to Charleston House in Sussex and Sissinghurst Castle Gardens in Kent. At various times a Saxon pig farm, Elizabethan mansion, prison and Victorian poorhouse, Sissinghurst was transformed by Vita Sackville West in the 1930s to its current magnificence, attracting garden lovers from all over the world. Charleston House, former home of 20th century artists and creative partners Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf’s sister) and Duncan Grant, is celebrating its 100th year. Treat yourself to its special centenary house and garden tour to get up close and personal with Charleston’s fabulous decorated interiors and magical walled ‘artists gardens’ created by Bell and Grant: intense and colourful, filled with sculpture, mosaics, tile-edged pools and touches of Bloomsbury humour.
Poldark fan or not, you’ll find Cornwall’s abundant and varied gardens the very best of British, from the world’s largest greenhouses of the Eden Project to more intimate gardens like Trelowarren, Glendurgan, Tresco Abbey and Tregothnan Botanic. We especially love the Lost Gardens of Heligan, with its exuberant subtropical jungle, romantic pleasure grounds, pioneering wildlife conservation projects, awesome setting and exclusive handmade walnut and honey ripple ice cream.
Further information www.greatbritishgardens.co.uk www.bethchatto.co.uk www.bethchatto.co.uk www.charleston.org.uk www.nationaltrust.org.uk/mottisfont
Article by Judith Schrut - email Judithat judith0777@gmail.com
Image: Charleston House and Gardens, Sussex, licensed under Creative Commons