The sun is shining (it does that sometimes, you know), the birds are singing and the bees are buzzing. There is the subdued chink of teacups and cake being eaten. I’m at that curiously English phenomenon – an open garden. These are almost as much part of an English summer as Chelsea, Wimbledon and Henley – but with your local placenames instead!
But back to the birds and the bees…
I’m standing on the front path listening politely to the owner as she discusses her garden with us. At that point, an adult vine weevil makes its slow, robotic way across the path in the space between us. My wife notices this and casually reaches out her foot and crushes the dreaded beast. The owner looks horrified. My wife looks equally horrified, but in a different way.
“Do you not know what that is?” she exclaims, “It’s a vine weevil!” However, the full horror seems lost on the hapless garden owner.
This event somehow sums up the experience of visiting an open garden as a landscape designer. The quiet, restrained affair of wandering round somebody else’s garden politely murmuring, while eying up the cake. If someone was to come close enough, they would hear you mutter:
“God, have you seen those Zinnias!” or perhaps,
“Lonicera Baggeson’s Gold – has nothing been done in this garden since 1988?”.
Being snobbish about water features is also something (almost) all of us indulge in – admit it now:
“Where did they get that! And that gnome with a fishing rod is definitely not ironic”.
This is because snooping is part of the immense pleasure of looking around another’s garden, but it must of course be done with some decorum. It can’t be seen to be openly critical.
Despite all this self-conscious superiority, I do genuinely enjoy the experience. I frequently come across plants that I haven’t seen for years and reassess their merits. We are so enclosed in the fashionable ‘Chelsea bubble’ that we often have short memories. There are often perfectly good plants that just drop off our radar because they’ve gone out of vogue. Of course, some are best left off the radar, but there are many others that deserve a second look. Invariably, I will see a plant combination I hadn’t thought of before or haven’t used for a while. And then there is the unpredictable sculpture – sometimes beautiful, sometimes fascinating, sometimes horrendous, but almost always deeply personal to the owner. I’ve also seen some quirky inside-outside objects planted up – sofas, double beds, toilets, even a piano. I’m never quite sure of thee, but they do make me chuckle.
And sometimes – despite my comments above – talking to the owners is fascinating, particularly about the history of the garden and property. You start to get a better understanding of the choices that they have made, what drives the design. Often, these gardens have just evolved, added to over the years, embellished, extended, reworked. Like chipped layers of paint on an old piece of furniture, you can often glimpse the remnants of earlier iterations – a plant that doesn’t quite fit, or an overgrown path not really leading anywhere – that are ghosts of previous layers.
For me, perhaps the archetype of open gardens is the garden at Turn End in Haddenham, Buckinghamshire. I first visited this about thirty years ago and was delighted to spend some time talking to the architect and garden maker, Peter Aldington, who lives there. It has layers of interest in the design, with discernible references to Spanish gardens, English country gardens, the 20th Century Garden modernist movement as practised by the likes of Victor Shanley, John Brookes and David Stevens, as well as plenty of interesting plant combinations and quirky objects. The garden is now on the national register and opens regularly. You’re still likely to find Peter (now over 90) wandering around or sitting in the sun, always prepared to have a chat. The tea and cakes are pretty good too!
The ‘yellow book’ of the National Gardens Scheme (NGS) is the bible for garden visitors. The scheme has been running for almost a hundred years and all proceeds go to charity – £3.4m in 2023. The have over 3,500 garden listed, covering England, Wales and Northern Ireland, with a similar (but separate) scheme covering Scotland. The gardens are small, large, simple, grand, modern, traditional, and quirky. Even if you visit twenty a year, it will still take you thirty-five years to visit them all! So whether you go to Turn End or somewhere nearer to you, get yourself out and visit some gardens this summer.