A garden marathon
An intense week of garden visiting to share
Back to my diary this week to tell you about the latest gardens I’ve seen. It’s a bumper crop of them too, as I’ve been starting work on a new book as well as keeping up with House & Garden recces and shoots. I don’t often say this, but I’ve almost reached saturation point - you can sometimes have too much of a good thing and the distinctiveness of each garden starts blurring. But they have all been pretty amazing in their own quirky ways and full of planting ideas to take away.
June 4th
It’s raining when I arrive at Gasper Cottage but as I drive in, the colours in the garden are extraordinary, turned up a notch by the rain. I first visited this garden on the Stourhead estate in Dorset about five years ago, and its owner Bella Hoare has developed it further since then. Bella is a fascinating person. It is interesting to come across a banker who is also an artist, and this dichotomy and how it is expressed in her garden interests me. She is a partner in Britain’s oldest privately-owned bank, C. Hoare and Co, and started painting after the loss of her first husband in a car accident in 2008. This was also the time that she started making the garden, and the intensity of planting, the joyfulness of it all, speaks louder than words.
