I was glancing through old photos I'd taken of French gardens in the Loire Valley and Versailles.  Much topiary, box, yews and grand vistas with axis galore and intimidating scales.  Large garden urns are a must to provide height.  

Although not my style I think Villandry in the Loire is the most magnificent potager I have seen, and was the inspiration behind Rosemary Verey's scaled down version at Barnsley house which launched a thousand imitations.

One garden I haven't visited in the Loire is on the top of my bucket list to see -  Le Prieuré d’Orsan.  The house and gardens have been completely restored to their past monastic glory by the current owners.    There was a great article about it in the Wall Street Journal's magazine section.

On a more modern note, if you are visiting the Loire Valley, and interested in gardens, an absolute must is the annual lInternational Garden Festival at Chaumont-Sur-Loire.  This international showcase of contemporary design attracts over 150,000 people each year and features over 30 gardens created within and around the idyllic setting of the château.  The festival was started in 1992, and features a new theme each year with a mission to provide a source of magic and inspiration.  The gardens are often strange, usually entertaining, sometimes futuristic or far-fetched and range from the simplest to the most incredible.  

The Garden House in Buckland Monachorum is claimed by Rachel de Thame to be "perhaps the most breath-taking of all gardens" -  the eight acre garden is certainly one I take a pilgrimage to whenever I'm in Devon.  

There is also a wonderful garden shop that sells many of the plants showcased in the garden for very reasonable prices.  I find it impossible to pass through without purchasing something.  This year, even though I have no garden to plant anything, I couldn't resist an unusual variegated Daphne and the Magnolia Felix Jury which was just coming into bloom just inside the gates.  I generously donated them to my daughter, in the hopes that if I ever retire to the UK they will still be alive and small enough to transplant!

Fortescues, The Garden House was originally the home of the vicars of Buckland Monachorum and the current house dates from the early 19th century.  The remains of the original 17th century vicarage, a tower with a spiral staircase and a thatched barn that served as the kitchen are now romantic ruins in the walled garden.  The church built a modern vicarage in the 1920s and sold the property as a private dwelling which was bought just after the Second World War by retiring master of Eton,  Lionel Fortescue and his wife Katharine. They renamed and renovated it and over the next 40 years developed the gardens into one of the finest in England.  They established the Fortescue Garden Trust to ensure their legacy would live on after they died and appointed Keith Wiley as head gardener to continue their work.   The Fortescues died in the 1980s and the ownership passed to the Trust, their head gardener was there for 25 years from 1978-2003 when he left to create his own nursery, Wildside Plants just a mile away. 

Keith Wiley not only embraced the Fortescue's vision, he took the garden to the next stage and  transformed it into one of the most innovative gardens in England.  I first stumbled across the garden one rainy day in 2000 when it was still under Wiley’s management. The weather was so miserable my husband stayed in the car and I went round with three grudging children who ended up exploring enthusiastically in the drizzle.  Years later after we’d moved to the USA I read that Keith Wiley was presenting at Swathmore’s 2008 Perennial Plant conference and listened to his lecture about the ‘new naturalism’ style of gardening he’d developed.  His gardening style works in harmony with nature and allowing plants to thrive as they would in the wild and taking inspiration from the wildflower meadows of South Africa, Crete and other natural landscapes he’s visited around the world.  At the Garden House he concocted a series of connected natural landscapes with outstanding breath, complexity and richness - even though it is a north-facing garden with very little sun in the winter.  


Matt Bishop took over from Wiley, and continued the world-class plantings with a particular emphasis on the snowdrops and bulbs that are his particular expertise. He left in fall of 2012 to set up his own business 'Matt Bishop Snowdrops' and Nick Haworth took.  Hopefully Haworth will continue the tradition of combining both traditional and modern planting styles that are skilfully innovative and that provide interest throughout the year in a unique and interesting way and the garden will continue to be at the cutting edge of horticultural excellence and innovation.  Both Wiley and Bishop designed planting schemes that are based on a natural, loose weaving of plants, but an even greater strength of the garden is the richness of design features, and the fabulous natural and man-made vistas that open up as you walk around.  Some of these vistas were originally created by the Fortescues who moved land and created interest in an otherwise flat landscape, but their original vision has been developed and enhanced over 70 years by the two great gardeners that have taken their place at the helm.

The Garden House remains a fabulous example of the British passion for plants executed with artistic and horticultural skill.  I was as enchanted today as I was 14 years ago - a truly great garden with an incredible combination of soft plants, strong structures, secret spaces and open views.

I was digging through old notebooks and stumbled upon scribblings from a lecture a couple of years ago about Irish Gardens given by Guy Cooper and Gordon Taylor.  Most gardens featured were grand and imposing.  There were many slides and anecdotes about Mount Stewart, which, according to Guy Cooper and Gordon Taylor, the formidable Marchioness of Londonderry modeled Mount Stewart after her ancestral home, Dunrobin Castle in Scotland.  A great socialite who often greeted her guests wearing an enormous diamond tiara nicknamed the “Londonderry fender”, when she first saw her husband’s home she called it the “darkest, dampest, saddest place I have ever stayed in” and proceeded to redesign and redecorate the interior and the gardens in the most lavish way possible. When her husband  succeeded to the Marquessate in 1915 there were plain lawns with decorative pots.  She added the Shamrock Garden, the Sunken Garden, increased the size of the lake, added a Spanish Garden with a small hut, the Italian Garden (planned by Gertrude Jekyll but the Marchioness liked only the plans, not the plantings), the Dodo Terrace, Menagerie, the Fountain Pool and laid out walks in the Lily Wood and rest of the estate. It is now considered one of the greatest gardens of Europe, in her words the grounds became “more cheerful and livable but beautiful.  After the death of her husband, she gave the gardens to the National Trust in 1957.

The rest of Cooper and Taylor's lecture was a fun romp through mainly grand estates, sprinkled with a few wonderful quotes -- one gardener interviewed told them how he agonized when deciding what tree should replace one felled in a storm “we’re very vulnerable to experts here.”  In French gardens, nature is bound by art, whereas in Ireland nature reigns supreme and humor and Irish wit are never far apart even in the grandest situations.

Powerscourt was one of the grandest, with a spectacular waterfall and  a staircase 40’ wide and a gardens originally designed in the seventeenth century which included a walled garden, fish pond, cascades, grottos and terraces. A century later the 6th Viscount Powerscourt instructed his architect, Daniel Robertson, to draw up new schemes for the gardens.

Robertson was a talented but dissolute, given to drink, always in debt and wheeled around in a wheelbarrow with a large bottle of sherry in one hand.  When the sherry was finished he’d collapse in a stupor and work was finished for the day.   When sober and slightly sloshed he was one of the leading proponents of Italianate garden design which was influenced by the terraces and formal features of Italian Renaissance villas and perfected in gardens in France and Germany.

His designs and the plans of other landscape experts Robertson designed the terrace nearest the house. He is said to have suffered from gout and directed operations from a wheelbarrow, fortified by a bottle of sherry. When the sherry was finished, work ceased for the day!

The death of the 6th Viscount in 1844 meant that alterations to the gardens ceased until his son resumed the work in the late 1850s. Using a combination of Robertson's designs and the plans of the other landscape experts led to the creation of enormous terraces, incredible pebble set mosaics and tree planting on an enormous scale -- 100 men and carts brought in soil, and planted 400,000 trees a year for 10 years as well as an amazing collection of statuary, ironwork and other decorative items from around the world.

Other gardens mentioned I longed to visit included Ballymaloe House and cooking school with 10,000 boxwood hedges based on Robert Carrier’s garden and the Chateau Villandry.  Includes a fabulous shell house which incorporates many of the shells used in the cooking school kitchens.

Altamont, one of the most romantic gardens in Ireland is a Robinsonian blend of formal and informal gardens on an 100 acre estate.  There are lawns bisected by sculpted yews sloping down to a romantic lake (dug by 100 men and horses just after the famine) and surrounded by rare trees, rhododendrons, shrubs and a profusion of roses and herbaceous plants.

The garden was planted by the wonderful sounding Feilding Lecky Watson who started collecting rhododendrons in Ceylon when he was invalided there by malaria during World War l.  He planted rhododendrons by the thousands and when he and his wife couldn’t decide what to call their youngest daughter he looked out the window and called her Corona after his favorite -- as she said she thanked God he hadn’t been partial to Bagwald Ruby.  Corona and her husband lived in the gate house before moving into the great house on her parents death and restored the gardens to their original beauty. 

Butterstream was the only garden shown that was built from scratch in the last 20 years by its owner, Jim Reynolds.  It was done without the long purse and cheap labor of the other estates and was the one I most wanted to visit - of course it doesn't seem to be open to the public at present. 

Here are Jim Reynolds words about it’s conception.:-

“It started innocently enough. There was no grand vision of Arcadia, no hint of an all-absorbing passion, no trumpets sounded in my ear - just the heaving and thud of a piece of clay being double-dug in preparation for the reception of a dozen hybrid tea roses.

This irrational urge to possess a few roses had come quite suddenly. While I had enjoyed helping to plant wallflowers and summer bedding as a child, I had during schooldays been a most reluctant gardener, baulking at the prospect of involvement with anything requiring physical exertion. By my early twenties the prospect of a little light dabbling in the garden seemed attractive enough: pruning, dead-heading and a spot of gentle weeding would not be too demanding, I thought.

I soon became a garden visitor. Mount Stewart, Birr Castle and Ilnacullin - all on a suitable grand scale -were favourite destinations. In Britain, Crathes and Sissinghurst provided inspiration. My horizons began to expand quickly and I realised that even a young chap with nothing more than a dozen roses could learn an immense amount about the principles of design, layout and planting.

These new-found notions and theories would have been of little use had there not been some ground on which to make a garden. I was particularly fortunate in growing up on a farm, so there was some space available for these early horticultural experiments and nobody particularly objected to my enclosing the corner of a field. As I became more ambitious (more foolish, my friends thought), the fence migrated farther and farther out into the field.

From the early 1970s a series of small compartments evolved. The site, being long and narrow, particularly lent itself to division, and as I began to collect plants and to concentrate on matters of design it seemed most reasonable and logical to devote different areas to particular plants or colour schemes.
In the beginning my ventures were greatly enlivened by the frequent visits of stampeding cattle or by browsing horses whose special delight was to pull recently planted shrubs and trees from the ground, chew on them a bit and then discard them. Other rural delights missed by town gardeners were the visits of the rabbits and hares. They shared things very fairly.

Knowing nothing, I naively assumed that I could grow anything that took my fancy: a few camellias, acacias, lots of rhododendrons, an embothrium or two. The possibilities seemed endless, or so the horticultural literature seemed to imply. After all, this is Ireland, we have a mild climate and we are: renowned for our Robinsonian gardens It did not take very long to learn that the Irish midlands are not suited at all to these things: the ungrateful persisted in dying. The soil is a heavy limestone clay and there is generally hard winter frost.

These setbacks did little to disenchant me, but were, I soon realised, a decided advantage and saved me from the dreaded fate of making a rhododendron garden supplemented with conifers and heathers for added boredom. I thoroughly agree with the late Russell Page's summary of most large rhododendron collections as being as artistically interesting as a wallpaper catalogue. Instead I came to the joys of roses old and new - enormous and sprawling like the delicious pink 'Belvedere Rambler' (common in old Irish gardens) or the delectable little Edwardian 'Natalie Nypels' - flowering shrubs and small trees, foliage plants and most importantly of all the unending range and variety of herbaceous perennials. There were choice and tasty pickings to be found in old gardens, particularly m old walled gardens around the country: shrub roses that had long ago lost their names and lots of tantalising herbaceous plants. The candelabra primulas, ‘Lissadel Pink' and ‘Asthore'; the startling alpine thistle, Eryngium alpinium ‘Slieve Donard'; and numerous choice old crocosmias and campanulas are just a few almost forgotten plants which were to be found. As a plant collector it would be so easy to end up with a jumble of horticultural misfits and oddities and no doubt some would find comets here which begin to resemble cabinets of curiosities I try to be rigid on matters of design and of colour, always bearing in mind that a garden should be an aesthetic or even sensual experience with a careful buildup of drama and excitement, interspersed with pauses leading to new expectations and eventually to a suitably timed climax. While each garden room at Butterstream is complete in itself with its own particular mood and planting, the eye is drawn onwards by the sight of a gate, an urn or a pavilion until the final comer is rounded and the grand finale comes into view. This is a small Tuscan temple reflected in a lily pool set in a wide pavement and surrounded by formal lines of box and terracotta pots, providing an evocation of a different world - a villa garden in Pompeii.

After 20 years of five to nine gardening (the best part of the day from nine to five was spent as an archaeologist of sorts), I decided that the garden should begin to keep me. Having worked single- handed for so long it was time to have a little help and this would be paid for by opening to the public, It is rather nice to note that the Good Gardens Guide has been pleased to honour my efforts with their highest accolade, two stars. Some think that my head will never again fit through the door.)

Nature must take much of the credit. Many things have succeeded in spite of me and the overall result has been beyond my expectations. My hope is that visitors will be inspired to be more adventurous and daring in their own gardens. It really is the greatest fun.”