Gardens to visit #001

by Culti-Vate

Culti-Vate is planning a lot of trips to see some wonderful gardens this year, this is just the first few we are desperate to see…

Can you recommend any?!

 

 

 

Alnwick Garden

Alnwick gardens are known for their transformation in the last ten years from waste ground to the creative and ambitious array of planting & landscaping you see today, and still with more to come. Alnwick is best known for ‘The Poison garden’, in which you can find Hemlock ‘C. maculatum’, Deadly Nightshade ‘Atropa belladonna’ and the Coca plant, which is used for cocaine. Along with all the information you are just dying to learn about them, like how much would kill you? and how painful & gruesome the consequences of ingesting each plant would be!

Abbotsford House & Gardens

The gardens, in particular the Walled and Morris garden, have beautiful herbaceous borders, a large kitchen garden and quadrants of fruit and vegetable beds.  

 

Clumber Park

Clumber park is worth visiting just for its 450ft long range glasshouse, but if that isn’t enough to draw your attention then there is also a 4 arce walled kitchen garden with magnificent herbaceous borders stretching the entire way  down to the glasshouse. Clumber park also has a museum of gardening tools full of interesting apparatus like a cucumber straightening jar! 

Haddon Hall

For the lovely borders (which are currently under inches & inches of snow!) leading up to this grand old house.

 

Howick Hall Gardens

This looks like a truly stunning garden from all I have read about it, with delightful planting that makes the most of each month & season of the year. Including varying bulbs, from snowdrops in early spring to old varieties of daffodils plant originally by Lady Grey.  Also fritillaries and then later in the year crocuses, and these are just the bulb displays in the garden! There is also woodland gardens, a wild bog garden around the pond & great summer borders. 

 

 

Dunge Valley Gardens

A spectacle of rhododendrons in a beautifully kept privately owned garden within a 100 acer nature reserve with wonderful views of the Pennine Hills. 

 

 

Great Dixter

I haven’t been back here since I was very young & my parents dragged me around while I moaned about visiting ANOTHER garden. Now that I have an ever growing love for all things horticulture I am desperate to go back & appreciate this truly great garden. 

Derek Jarman Prospect Cottage

Because you just must visit! 

 

Part two coming soon…

Please recommend some more garden for Culti-Vate to visit/feature, it doesn’t matter how big or small or where they are!