The 2025 holiday saw a group of us depart from Lavenham for York. We were to spend three nights away, and visit seven gardens, including a whole day at RHS Bridgewater.
The journey north was broken by a stop at Barnsdale, our first garden. Those of us who used to watch Geoff Hamilton presenting Gardeners World had happy memories of seeing Barnsdale on TV, and I was not the only person to be delighted to find that one of the homemade wooden obelisks had survived, complete with its money saving ballcock finial. The gardens have continued to develop since Geoff’s untimely death, with the addition of show gardens relocated from Gardener’s World Live. I began to suffer severe greenhouse envy at the number of little glasshouses, and to play the game of seeing how things were looking compared to my specimens of the same variety at home. In most cases I am afraid that Barnsdale’s pelargoniums were better, and their Hoya definitely was. I noted down the names of several plants that I could visualise working in my own garden. Digitalis ‘Goldcrest’ had reasonably large flowers in a pleasing shade of apricot yellow. The newish Cosmos variety ‘Apricotta’ which I have noticed in seed catalogues was very pretty in the flesh. The gigantic Achillea macrophylla might work in one of the wilder places, although it was very large and rather floppy. Most exquisite of all when I managed to find it was the tiny sweet pea, Lathyrus sativus var azureus, which Erica had told me I must see. It had flowers of a very beautiful, old fashioned shade of blue which made me think of an Eric Ravilious painting, and slender, elegant grey leaves.
In the afternoon we stopped at a private garden near Selby, Skipwith Hall. This was a gem in the kind of relaxed, wildlife friendly style which looks low maintenance but must require massive amounts of skill and editing to keep it at just the right side of toppling into anarchy. It had some design input from Cecil Pinsent a long time ago, and from Miranda Holland Cooper more recently, but felt like very much the family’s own creation. Most of the grass was allowed to grow long, and the owners were apologetic that the meadow next to the terrace had just had to be cut to accommodate the village fete. Interesting and well-chosen shrubs grew in the grass, and there were some good and well-sited statues including a walking minotaur and Barbara Hepworth-esque abstract. An artfully ruined paved area had lovely things like pale pink thyme and Erodium growing freely in the gaps, so unlike my own paving where creeping thistle erupts through the cracks. Large, rusted iron columns with elaborate tops introduced by Miranda Holland Cooper marched around the garden, and long sweeps of rugosa roses, while the rivers of Agapanthus that ran along the boundary walls must be spectacular when out. The only thing that I did not think was a complete success was the maze, with shell paths and borders delineated with iron edging but rather sparse planting, perhaps due to the drought. The owners were welcoming and delightful and seemed utterly unfazed by the fact that we had arrived during an unscheduled power cut and that they had somehow to provide tea for nearly thirty people, which they managed to do.
The next day we drove to Salford but missed seeing the view from what our driver told us was the highest point of any motorway in England due to the torrential rain. By the time we reached RHS Bridgewater it had cleared and armed with my map I set off to explore as much of the more than 150 acres as could be seen in one day. The garden first opened to the public just over four years ago, and there is already a great deal to see, and a great deal left to do when funds permit. It is being developed to a masterplan by Tom Stuart-Smith and promises to hang together as a unified design better than the RHS gardens that have developed piecemeal while trying to juggle research, horticultural education and visual appeal. The highlight to me was what has been done within the historic walled garden, and especially Tom Stuart-Smith’s Paradise Garden. This had three planting areas, each with its own formal pool, linked by rills. One was devoted to mainly Asian plants, one to American plants, and the third to those from the Mediterranean, and the planting was as dense and complex and satisfying as you would expect from that designer. I especially warmed to the Mediterranean end, perhaps because it contained many old friends that I can grow on my Essex sand while the other sections included quite a few species that I have managed to kill. The design was as satisfying as the planting, and I particularly admired the sightline down the centre of the entire Paradise Garden and single large specimen tree offset from the central pool, so that the layout was not entirely symmetrical. Water played a significant part across the whole Bridgewater site, with a lake dating from the original Victorian garden and a winding stream linking it to a second lake hear the visitor centre. Moisture loving plants were set along the edges of the stream and western edge of the original lake to form the Chinese Water Garden and streamside walk. The planting was good, and the way it had been blended into the long grass and wild plants next to it was superb. Other features included the national collection of rhubarb, which was looking much jollier than my rhubarb in drought stricken north Essex, although it is difficult to really appreciate rhubarb just by looking at it and without cooking and eating it. The Hydrangea paniculata trial was the sort of thing you would expect the RHS to do, and Tom Stuart-Smith had found somewhere for it to go where it did not impinge on the decorative landscape features. There were so many interesting and good plants that it is very difficult to pick out one or two, but I was struck by the use of pleached Parrotia persica in the Paradise Garden and again as specimens near the visitor centre, the latter having already developed a strong purple tinge and bearing the variety label Bella. I am very fond of Persian ironwoods and have noticed them appearing in lists of trees that might do well in the changing UK climate. It would be interesting to return to Bridgewater as it develops: the Chinese Scholar’s Garden is at the moment a large hole in the ground, with buildings being made by local crafts people in China, and the masterplan showed the eastern half of the lake eventually being cleared and the footprint of the lost Victorian house being made more visible in the landscape. The story of the house is sad and not unusual, with the family leaving at the outbreak of WWI never to return, and the house succumbing to rot, subsidence and fire before being demolished not long after the end of WW2.
The morning of our second full day saw us back on the Eastern side of the Pennines at Scampston Hall near Malton. The main feature here was another historic walled garden, which opened to the public twenty years ago with a Piet Oudolf design, his largest privately commissioned project in the UK. I saw it once fifteen years ago, in October, and was keen to see it again and in the summer. It underwent a renovation in the interim, as the hedges had grown taller than intended and the planting drifted from the original plans. On my second visit it remained very much as I remembered it, with Piet Oudolf’s signature (and much copied) naturalistic planting and wavey topped hedges. The garden was divided into rooms, sometimes by clipped beech and sometimes by tall shrub borders which managed to obscure the view beyond while allowing the shrubs to express their individual shapes. A non-continuous line of pleached lime around two edges of the garden gave an additional layer of formality. Not all the garden areas were equally densely planted: some contained nothing but clipped yew and grass, a technique used in mid twentieth century gardens of rooms. The substantial mount in one compartment would have been the height of garden fashion in Tudor or Stuart times. From the top it was possible to see quite how much clipped hedging there was in total. A charming conservatory, restored since my first visit, housed a collection of pelargoniums, and hosted workshops for learning disabled adults. I looked for evidence of the planting restoration, as it is always useful to pick up information about maintenance on garden visits. The grove of katsura at the centre of the garden had been cut hard back close to the ground and regrown with multiple stems, and an acer in the border running around the inside of two of the walls had also been hard pruned at about the six-foot mark and grown away successfully. There were some areas of box caterpillar damage, and difficult decisions are going to have to be taken soon. While we were there it seemed a waste not to go to the front of the house to view the Capability Brown landscape. This featured a lake, formed by damming a stream, with a nice Palladian bridge at one end and a cascade at the other, not so large and grand as the one at Chatsworth but still making a satisfying amount of noise. Later garden owners had added whatever was in fashion at the time and took their fancy, so there was a parterre, now affected by box caterpillar, and a rockery, dating from Edwardian times and currently undergoing restoration. Several large coniferous trees lurked to each side of the parkland view, presumably legacies of the Victorian conifer craze. The park was fine, but the reason to go the Scampston is the walled garden.
In the afternoon we visited Breezy Knees at Warthill near York. Many of us had heard of Breezy Knees and were curious to see it. Spoiler alert: many of us did not know what to make of it when we had seen it. It was an extraordinary creation. The garden was not attached to any house and reached down a long path from the car park. It occupied acres of what must have been farmland. One of the first features we encountered was a large annual meadow, predominantly yellow with splashes of blue, and a gigantic flowerpot sculpture in the background and huge trowel in the foreground. The flowers were pretty and the sculptures amusing. After that I rapidly became very confused, and rather lost since we were not given paper maps, the person on the door telling us to photograph the garden map on our phones. I did not want to try and walk around a garden looking at a tiny map on my phone and thought I would have to rely on my sense of direction, but those who did take a picture found it was too sunny to see their phones, and there were no more maps within the garden. There were a lot of gardens, each with a name and a theme, and no rhyme or reason that I could discover as to how they linked together. There were a lot of flowers, many very brightly coloured, a lot of shrubs and a lot of trees. Some individual things were very nice, but I didn’t find they gelled into a coherent whole. When we all met again some of our group said that they had found the sense of not knowing what was around each corner exhilarating. Others said that it was not a proper garden, but we struggled to explain why. One theory was that it was because there was no house, but RHS Bridgewater was not built around a house and nobody seemed to mind. Maggie thought that it looked municipal. I can see that the tarmac paths and brilliant colour palette leaned that way, but municipal gardens can be attractive even if one doesn’t want one at home. Somebody said it lacked charm, which was probably nearer the mark, though pinning down what constitutes charm is horribly difficult and charm, like beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder. Somebody else said it lacked purpose. I thought its meaning was probably that the owners, who we did not meet, simply had an irresistible urge to plant more and more things and the means to do so. I am very glad to have seen it and have spent a long time trying to understand my own reaction to it without managing to pin down exactly why I didn’t warm to it. Did it need more calm green areas? More foliage? A less arbitrary layout? More shade? More thoughtfully considered plant associations? Or am I, like Vita Sackville West dismissing rhododendrons as Ascot, Sunningdale sort of plants, simply a garden snob?
My secret inner garden snob was fully gratified the next morning by our visit to York Gate in the outskirts of Leeds. This one-acre garden was created by a couple and their son between the 1950s and 1990s, is now owned by the charity Perennial, is grade II listed, and is justly famous. It had been on my radar to visit for a very long time. We assembled in a circular paved area in front of the house, surrounded by sand beds to provide drainage for dry loving plants, which I presumed was made after the family’s time to help accommodate garden visitors. The rest of the garden wrapped around the side and back of the house on a significant slope. It was divided into many areas, some of them tiny, but never felt cramped or claustrophobic. Some were paved, some gravelled, some had mown grass. There were shady green areas and patches of sun. There were beautifully clipped hedges and informal divisions of shrubs, so that the whole garden was never visible at once. The planting was intricate and perfect, with wonderfully considered plant pairings like the little dots of purple Sanguisorba which exactly picked out the purple of a neighbouring daylily. There were judicious splashes of bright colour such as a vivid orange Hemerocallis. Shady walls had ferns and hostas luxuriating at their feet. Conifers, mulched with large pebbles, each occupied their own space to show their shapes without growing into each other. Every time I turned, I saw something I had not seen before, a tiny path leading among shade loving plants, or bromeliads amusing growing out of the fork in a beech trunk. A stone dolphin spouted water into a long stone trough, while a stone ball at the other end of the trough acted as a full stop. A white painted cast iron fire hydrant provided an eye catcher seen from the top of the garden, while echoing the bark colour of the neighbouring birch trees. An area of stone setts in front of some leaf bins was laid in a complex pattern to accommodate the triangular shape. Everything was well-made, well-chosen and well done. I was deeply satisfied and in awe.
Our final stop on our journey home was Home Farm at Ryhall near Stamford. This was a family garden, which opens for the NGS. The owners were very hospitable and delighted to see visitors, and apologetic that the roses which are a major feature of the garden were past their best. We were however at the right time for the hedges of tall lavender. Their wildflower meadow was still looking nice, with a generous scattering of the white flowered version of lady’s bedstraw, and the seed heads of the grasses waving in the wind. The view out across the rolling Lincolnshire countryside was superb, but did mean that it was a windy garden, and I imagined would be tricky to manage. I walked down the hill across the field outside the gardened area, to stretch my legs after the coach journey and see the tree plantings and saw an immense quantity of rabbit droppings. The local bunny population must have managed to bounce back from the diseases affecting rabbits, and the owners must have to keep a good eye on their rabbit fences.
We got back to Lavenham slightly ahead of schedule, after a very satisfactory trip. I returned with my brain buzzing with ideas and questions, although I must remember when it comes to plans for my own garden that the north of England gets more rain than the Clacton coastal strip. Huge thanks are due to Erica and Maggie for organising it, and especially to poor Karen who helped with the organisation and then couldn’t go on the holiday due to Covid. Dee, our cheerful and unflappable coach driver, deserves a special mention. I am also grateful to my fellow EAGG members for being warm and inclusive to those of us like me who were travelling without a partner or companion. Finally, my thanks go to my husband who once again undertook vast amounts of watering as the south of England sweltered in a heatwave and made it possible for me to go on the trip.
