The Garden House (Devon, England)
The destinations are beginning to blur but looking at the tour guide booklet, I see that we are now in Plymouth. Today, we visited two gardens designed by Keith Wiley. The first is The Garden House , where Wiley worked as Head Gardener for 25 years (from 1978-2003). The 10-acre estate was purchased in the 1940s by former Eton schoolmaster Lionel Fortescue and his wife Katherine. It was formerly home to the vicars of Buckland Monachronum. The Fortescue's renovated the gardens and ran a market garden business and raised cattle. The remains of some of the original buildings in the vicarage still stand in the garden and serve as a romantic backdrop in the Walled Garden - I loved the way they had massed ferns together. Just stunning! Surrounding the walled garden and venturing out away from the house are more naturalistic plantings - Today, the head gardener is Nick Haworth, who was previously head gardener at Greenway , which we visited earlier. Keith Wiley lef...
Your garden looks stupendous this August, especially given the recent heatwave. My Osteospermums mostly shut down flower production during the summer months (although, when I'm lucky, the plants themselves don't perish). My snapdragons are done and gone. The chaste tree I planted years ago from a tiny pot is still small and hasn't flowered but I haven't given up on it. Oddly, I haven't even seen flowers on my Hesperaloes this year - maybe too little water even for them :(
ReplyDeleteThe photo of Yucca 'Coral Glow' is looking very nice against the weeping cedar. It's not often that you shoot this angle of the garden. It looks to be a dark leaf Euphorbia in the back. Do you know which it is?
ReplyDeleteChavli
Chavli, that is Euphorbia 'Blackbird'. This bed is along the elevated retaining wall next to the driveway (that goes downhill). It has been a challenge finding things that grow well there.
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