My fellow garden blogger Helen at Patient Gardener put into words in her last blog post exactly how I am beginning to feel about visiting and writing about gardens. Jaded (a description used by Helen) is the correct way to describe my frame of mind at the moment. I have a photo library full of photos taken at recent gardens I am yet to blog about. There are times when carrying a camera and looking for the best way to capture the garden takes away the enjoyment of the garden itself hence some recent visits I have not used my camera at all.
I did have my small Fuji camera with me last week when I went with my daughter and grandchildren to the National Trust property at Tyntesfield, in Somerset. With lots of parkland, its terraced lawns and only a few flowerbeds, Tyntesfield is a great place for the children to run around.
What is of interest at this property is the established Kitchen Garden and I always head down the hill towards it on every visit. It has been a while since I was at Tyntesfield and was delightd to see that someone had the brilliant idea to turn a building near to the Kitchen Garden into a tearoom. This gives a much needed respite without having to walk up the steep hill back to the main restaurant.
Just in front of the tearoom and before you enter the Kitchen Garden is the restored Orangery. I wrote about this in November 2011 and you can see how much work has been done to get it to be looking so good.
Guaranteed never to fail to delight, the Kitchen Garden was not only bursting with colourful, exuberant and blousy dahlias, the vegetables also looked as though they had been fed some sort of ‘mega grow’.
The gardeners at Tyntesfield have clearly given a lot of thought to information that visitors often crave and miss when wandering around gardens. It was good to see little slate notices around the Kitchen Garden with explanations of what they are doing and trying to achieve.
As I said earlier, Tyntesfield doesn’t have vast expanses of flower beds but what it does have is pockets of interest you come across as you walk around the grounds. Halfway down the hill from the house is the Rose Garden with low box hedging which my grandchildren enjoy running around – like a mini maze where you can see over the top. Here I also came across slate information notices – I am really quite taken and impressed with this idea.
I’ve been to NT properties where there is clearly something happening in the background with the management of flowerbeds and/or the garden in general, but no reasons given, such as why the roses look so manky – sorry Nymans but please take note!
Thank you Paul Evans, Head Gardener and his Gardening Team for being so thoughtful, keep up the slate info boards and I hope the idea spreads to other NT gardens. Many of us don’t just visit gardens for walking around, we also visit for ideas, suggestions and explanations of why things are the way they are.
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