Dixter in the drizzle

I was on the South coast of England late staying in a post called Rye . A fairly walled town which was also home to your own Henry James for a while . It is close to Hastings ( one of the fin larboard -the others being Sandwich * , Dover , Hythe and New Romney ) * * , which is probably the most famous historical site in England . 1066 is a date that almost everybody will recognise as the Battle of Hastings and the intrusion of William the Conqueror – the last time England was intrude on .

What has any of this historical drivelling amaze to do with gardens ? I will tell you . Just a few miles up the road from Rye is one of England ’s ok gardens , Great Dixter . The original house was build up in the 15th hundred but was remodelled by the with child Edwardian architect , Edwin Lutyens ( long meter partner in crime with the unnerving Gertrude Jekyll , one of our best garden designers ) . When I say remodelled it is a flimsy understatement : what really happened is that another , 16th century , home was move from Kent and rebuilt on the website .

It was the dwelling house of Christopher Lloyd for most of his life . Christopher was a writer , reader , instructor , cook and gardener who reverse Dixter from a good garden into something quite extraordinary and world famous . His plant knowledge was encyclopaedic and he wrote extensively , and very well , on the subject field in books and newspaper columns . The garden was give to the public in the fifties and his enceinte acquirement was in courageously vary around the planting in the garden and being unafraid of bright colour and really intensive horticulture . Most the great unwashed are always trying to make less study for themselves in the garden , at Dixter the bed are regularly dig out up and raw plants are moved in at least three times a year .

credibly the bad modification he made were to develop hayfield in the topiary garden and to drudge up the rose garden and turn over it into an alien court full of tumid leaved jungly plant and burnished colouring material .

Christo died in 2006 and the running play of the garden is now in the hands of a benevolent trust and the phenomenal Fergus Garrett who first started exploit in the garden in the early nineties . He is extraordinarily passionate about the garden and runs it with a vitality and zip of which Christo would be proud . On the twenty-four hours we visited he and his staff had just finish take 6,500 cutting of tender plants . The next task was to dig up two huge borders in edict to implant thousands of bulbs . The best thing is that he is not create a museum here , it is a garden that is still vary and develop and moving forward . A dead garden , after all , is a expire garden .

An amazing place , this alone is well worth the airfare . Come on over .

as in “ the sandwich ” . formulate , supposedly , by the Earl of Sandwich who did not want to lead the card board so as to eat so ordered kernel between to slicing of staff of life so as to stop his workforce getting too greasy and mess up the playing cards . Obviously the principle existed for one C beforehand but without a convenient name .
- the Cinque Ports are an historic group of port along the south easterly bound of England just where the English Channel is at its narrowest . They were heavily fight just in case the beastly Frenchies decide to intrude on .

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