Posts under ‘real gardens’

Rachel from Wisteria and Cow Parsley recently sent me some images of her gorgeous vegetable patch at Tumbledown Farm. When I looked through them, I fell so in love with this dreamy plot that I had to get them online as soon as possible.

It is a cold, cold day, and I’m longing for better weather and ripe tomatoes, so I thought I’d share some photos of some marvellous balcony gardens I spotted in Lefkas, Greece, a couple of years ago. I love continental balcony gardens. Their owners always take so much effort over making them fabulous and kitsch, [...]

Trebah is a garden that leaves you wishing you were a child again so you could run through the forests of giant rhubarb and clamber through the ravine, pretending you were an explorer. Actually, when I visited  few years ago, I found myself secretly doing this anyway. This tropical ravine garden in Cornwall will leave [...]

Kathy Brown takes us through the creation of her incredible Winter Garden at Stevington, which opens to the public this month.
A photographer once phoned me up in January and asked whether it would be worth his while coming to visit. I was forced to say ‘NO’. I was shocked by my answer, never having considered [...]

The walled garden at Rousham is one of those must-see sites, a fabulous example of English landscape design. Unlike many of the real gardens we feature on F&F, Rousham has remained largely untouched since its inception in the eighteenth century. There are still fat herbaceous borders, a small parterre and marvellous espalier apple trees.
Here are [...]

Digging up the veg in this potager must be a rather bittersweet experience when every lettuce and tomato is part of such a marvellous picture. This vegetable patch might be far more than just functional, but it still keeps the owners of the Old Rectory, Tony and Ann Huntingdon, supplied with plenty of crisp, immaculate [...]

Doddington Place was once moulded out of plasticine. Not in the James May style that left so many gardeners grumpy at the Chelsea Flower Show last year, but in its nascent stages, on a wooden board. The garden was planned this way, with the then-owner Mrs Douglas Jeffreys seating herself on the terrace of her [...]

Kathy Brown joins Fennel & Fern to write about her work as a garden designer. The Manor House, Stevington is her stunning garden, and she tells us about how she created it.
There was almost no garden when we arrived at Stevington. We inherited a donkey, a large formal fishpond and a solardome; an ordchard and [...]

Many gardeners like to claim their plots are ’secret’. Perhaps this is because it takes so long to find the site, or because no-one has heard about the gardens at all. But these gardens really had lain in secret, completely forgotten until the owners of the house – The Salutation – finally discovered them, hidden [...]

It is funny to think that a garden so grand as Hatfield House was in part planned as a place for women and children to take exercise. A huge, ornate and beautiful gym for 18th century members of the house to walk or ride up and down.

Of course, the gardens are much more than that: [...]

Mark Diacono runs a farm nestled in a valley. He grows peaches, apricots, kiwis, olives, grapes, persimmons and szechuan pepper. From that list, you might be forgiven for thinking Otter Farm is in Italy or Greece. But the name ‘Otter’ betrays its location: this farm is in East Devon, England. It’s a climate change farm, [...]

Anne Wareham takes us through the inspirations behind the garden she created at Veddw.
In “A Book of Silence” Sara Maitland reflects on the place of gardens in the church and the monastic tradition and then goes on:
“I discovered there were modern and secular interpretations of this tradition – gardens that reflect, illustrate and develop personal [...]

Standing on a station platform is normally something we do reluctantly. It isn’t really an activity you would wish to draw out. Unless of course, you are waiting for a train at Leamington Spa station. Then you might will your train to be late so you can wander a little longer around the beautiful platform [...]

Gardens, as we know, are never a finished work. The older plots have layers of discarded designs from former owners and fashions, and the result is never really a result. It is still changing. The Bishop’s Palace and Gardens in Wells is a prime example of this. When head gardener James Cross talks me through [...]

Come winter and most gardeners crawl indoors for a hard-earned rest. Not so the team at Anglesey Abbey, who this week will head down to their winter garden with jet-washers and scrubbing brushes. Washing the trees keeps the extraordinary display of colourful and ornamental barks pristine in preparation for the busiest season.
The Winter Garden is [...]