ARTICLES - July 2010 News Letter

Dear Fellow Garden Lover,

June is the month for ‘Open Gardens’ season to begin, loads of lovely gardens to visit and get ideas and inspiration from. On Saturday 12th June, I took myself off to visit Salterns Cottage at Seaview, Isle of Wight. It used to be something to do with the salt pans on the north coast of the island and dates back to 1640, it underwent a considerable conversion in 1934 when the work was paid for by the owners great grandfather, apparently wrote the original script for the film of Dracula. The garden itself was immaculate and hoovered within an inch of its life, a beautiful lawn and flower beds filled with roses and delphinium. The vegetable garden at the far end was made up of raised beds set at angles with a centre piece, at the far end a huge conservatory and potting shed with shiny tools displayed on the walls. It was a garden that apparently ‘did as it was told’!

On 18th June, another garden visit, this time to see the new Princess Beatrice Garden at Carisbrook Castle also on Isle of Wight. We reached it by walking past a stunningly pretty ford, along an equally pretty lane, then schlepping up an extremely steep hill to reach the front of the castle. The garden was developed and built a year ago and has had all that time to mature. It was designed by Chris Beardshaw who wanted to cram in as much as he could to maintain interest throughout each season, this he has succeeded in doing by cramming at least 350 varieties within the garden space.

The planting was fantastic, and looked wonderful, though we did think some of the yew hedges looked a bit shaggy, apart from that it was a lovely space to be in with benches dotted here and there, another thought is that they could have had a more glamorous fountain the one they had was a bit ordinary. Oh dear I seem to be winging about the place but that is wrong, the garden was lovely, its just little niggly bits and pieces that I am sure will be ironed out over the years, but I must add one more thing, everybody in my group said it was a shame that English Heritage did not produce a planting list. Most people like us would have been quite happy to pay a small fee extra to have details of all the plant varieties and where they were planted it would have answered many questions that we all had. Also I loved their plant labels which were clearly printed and slightly quirky in keeping with the old fashioned feel of the garden.

28th June: Brighstone Village Gardens were open to the public, the local gardeners put on a magnificent show and produced 11 gardens for us to look round all for £4.50. It was a steamy hot day and as the gardens were spread out over quite a wide area we only managed to see 8 out of the 11 which is not bad as we took our time around each of the ones we visited. The childrens vegetable garden at Brighstone Primary School was a delight, the land was apparently donated by the people next door who gave the children part of their garden to use for their lessons. So they inherited an apple tree and a grape vine. The garden was brightly decorated with all the vegetables and flowers in raised beds all producing good crops of a wide variety of vegetables, the garden club is run as an after school activity and seems to be very successful in encouraging the gardeners of the future. My favourite garden was The Old Rectory which can only be described as opulent. It was straight out of Jane Austen with smooth lawns, lush planting of wide borders, mature trees, rose arches, a lovely lily pond and a terrace with spectacular views over the local countryside down to the sea.

One moan, the map provided to help us find our way round all those gardens was almost totally incomprehensible! If you are producing a map you should never assume that the readers know as much as you do about the area in question. I went with a friend who did know the area fairly well, but even she was struggling to figure our where we were supposed to be, so yah boo sucks to the person who is guilty of rotten map making!

And on that note, Happy July Gardening
D.Langdon-Smith
1st July 2010