I’m not an assiduous visitor of gardens, though I do have my favourites, such as Hidcote Manor in the Cotswolds (seen here in the featured image), which we head to at every opportunity. Visiting any garden is always a chance to garner new ideas and inspirations and maybe to bring them home for local adaptation.
Sometimes the stimulus comes from unlikely places. The tree planting at the University of Navarra, for example, was instrumental in shaping my ideas for the arboretum in the Dumfriesshire Garden. The sunken garden at the Crichton Campus in Dumfries also found a refracted application in a sunken area of my own garden ‘design’. In 2024, three contrasting gardens stand out as sources of pleasure and influence that might in some small way be transferred and translated at home.
We spent a very wet five days in the Lake District in mid-April. I enjoyed wandering around the informal country garden as well as the more structured elements adjacent to the property and had two take away ideas.
First the photinias. I noticed how they were doing well planted in grass and in wet conditions. So when I got home, I replicated the approach near the pond in my own garden. In the more woodland area of the Lakeland garden, with its mown paths, I encountered a beautiful wooden circle that was pleasant to walk through, but which also created a wonderful focal point and could be seen from various angles. This surely will merit a conversation with our joiner in 2025.
In July, a few days in Paris provided the chance to visit the Luxembourg Gardens, well known through films and novels but never experienced first hand. It covers 25 hectares, divided between the ‘French’ and ‘English’ styles. With its centrepiece of elegant fountains falling into a 50 metre long bassin, an orangerie, and chestnut groves it has much to admire. ‘Le Luco’ as the Parisians call it, has everything a city could want in a public space. Including its wonderful garden furniture, stylish and robust and perfectly suited for a quiet spot in the Dumfriesshire Garden!
August brought a weekend at Matfen Hall in Northumberland , where a recent uplift had included enhancements of the original Victorian garden. Like all the best gardens, this one demonstrated the important quality of foresight, manifested especially in wonderful trees to delight generation after generation. Thus inspired, and on returning home I planted a giant redwood (at the moment about 15 inches high) to add to other specimen trees like coast redwood, Californian pine, holm oak and cedar of Lebanon that are already doing well in the Dumfriesshire Garden.
If travel ‘broadens the mind’, it also has the capacity, even in small ways, to enhance our gardens at home.
The full list of pieces that make up my A-Z in the Dumfriesshire Garden in 2024 can be found here: https://davidgrahamclark.net/a-z-of-the-dumfriesshire-garden-in-2024/
Quotidian 