So cold here in Huddersfield this weekend and its now snowing, so have had a lazy morning reading the paper and catching up with some gardening magazines. Had a good laugh at Alys Fowler's latest column in the Guardian. She talks about trying to pass the winter with a "furtive garden porn habit, locking myself into my office to look at pictures of vegetables, or verdant gardens in full summer sun", very funny and I think I'm with her on that one, looking at glossy pictures of glorious gardens in magazines and books, just about gets me through the winter! Though it doesn't all have to be visual, I love reading about gardening and gardens too. I always think its odd that there are no garden shows on TV over the winter, this is when we need to see gardens to help us plan our plots and gardens for the next season. Maybe its just me....
Anyway I've spent a lovely hour going through some pics of gardens that I have visited over the last few years for some inspiration and to feed my habit.
Inverewe Gardens, in Poolewe on the west coast of Scotland.
This is an amazing Scottish garden, which has an amazing collection of rhododendrons and azaleas and has a kitchen garden on the edge of the sea shore. The garden has the perfect growing conditions of one of may favourite flowers the Blue Himalayan poppy.
The tranquil Japanese garden at Tatton Park.
Trentham Gardens in Staffordshire, recently renovated with garden designer, Tom Stuart-Smith. This picture shows a section of the prairie garden.
A local garden with a fabulous nursery attached, in Halifax, it has sumptuous prairie planting again.
Finally one of my fairly recent garden discoveries and now so far my favourite garden is York Gate on the outskirts of Leeds. Relatively small but packed with ideas and plants grown in different environments, beautiful. Here it is in mid-spring.
Finally an image of summer taken at Scampston Hall in North Yorkshire, the flower which is adored by bees and butterflies, the sunflower.
Inverewe Gardens, in Poolewe on the west coast of Scotland.
I've been catching up with my Garden magazines today, lovely! We visited Inverewe Gardens a few years ago, it's a lovely garden - in fact I think it was perhaps the first garden I visited when I decided that I wanted 'a garden'.
ReplyDeleteAll of the gardens you feature are lovely in their own way - I can feel myself drooling at the sight of them - especially as it is pretty awful here at the moment. Summer seems a long way away.
ReplyDeleteOh Annie, some lovely photos there. I've wanted to go to a few of the ones you've shown for a while. It is my quest this year to get to Scampston, my parents live up North so need to try and combine it with a trip up there. That garden and nursery near Halifax is another and luckily hubby's parents live near Burnley so that one shouldn't be hard to get to.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree about the lack of gardening programmes on over the winter. Now is the perfect time. They stick them all on in the summer when we're all out in our gardens with no time to watch them. The tv schedulers obviously aren't gardeners or they would understand that.
Lovely post to read on this bitterly cold morning, and I really like that last photo!
ReplyDeleteI shall have a furtive afternoon armchair gardening reading. Flighty xx