Thursday Thoughts – More from Great Dixter

As this was my favourite house and garden on the tour, I will post some more from both the garden and indoors. The interior was very special, and the windows amazingly beautiful.

On entering the house, the light from the many windows and the open architectural solution made for an immediate love. In the header you can see the second floor and some more modern architecture.

I loved the seemingly wild and random, unorganized looks of the garden – even if I knew there is a design behind it. For more facts, please visit Jude again!

The nursery is a must see in every garden – and maybe buy a little something…which I of course did! Thank you for walking with me – hope to see you in my next garden walk too.

Thursday Thoughts – More Close-ups from Sissinghurst

May I treat you to another gallery of beauties – cannot resist…

Another of the many lovely lilies to finish the Thursday!

Thursday Thoughts – Great Dixter

When we left Sissinghurst that day, I wondered how any garden would be able to match it. But, Great Dixter did. Great Dixter is a house in Northiam, East Sussex, England. It was built in 1910–12 by architect Edwin Lutyens. The original Northiam house, dating from the mid-15th century, was acquired by a businessman named Nathaniel Lloyd in 1909.

Lloyd and Lutyens began the garden at Great Dixter, but it was Lloyd’s son Christopher Lloyd, a well known garden writer and television personality, who made it famous. The garden is in the arts and crafts style, where the planting is profuse, yet structured, and has featured many bold experiments of form, colour and combination.

The garden is currently managed by Fergus Garrett, who worked closely with Lloyd up until his death in 2006 as Head Gardener and introduced a number of innovations into the planting scheme.

I hope you enjoy the variety of this garden in my short gallery! For species and other facts, please visit Jude again!

I am sorry to say I haven’t even tried to find the names of all the flowers, but, Jude will know.

They are all glorious. The house and gardens are my number one from this week.

There will still be more gardens to come…

Thursday Thoughts – Sissinghurst, a Gardener’s Dream

Sarah of Travel With Me posted on Sissinghurst for the LACP this week, and I recommend reading her post for its beauty and for the background history of the house and grounds. For species and extraordianry flower knowledge, I recommend you go to Jude’s beautiful site. As I visited some weeks ago, I had prepared a post for today – but this garden is well worth visiting more than once.

Sissinghurst in Kent is a famous English garden, with a series of ‘garden rooms’, each filled with different planting schemes and unique designs. This garden is a result of Harold Nicolson’s design and the plantings of his wife, author Vita Sackville-West.

It was such a treat to visit a place where creative cooperation showed such magnificent results. I have read several works of Virginia Woolf, and knew she had an intimate relation with Vita Sackville-West. I can imagine they must have enjoyed each others company as creative souls. I could almost see them walking together here, arm in arm through the gardens.

I loved the different ”garden rooms”. Maybe mostly the white garden and the yellow garden.

This is the view from the top of the tower, where the different ”rooms ” are clearly showing. And Vita Sackville-West’s writing room in the tower was extremely difficult to photograph, as it was in the middle of the narrow staircases and only a tiny platform to land on while other visitors were passing by.

I hope you enjoyed Sissinghurst once again!

Thursday Thoughts – The End of Summer

Summer is moving towards its end, and the evenings are soft with bloom in the fading light. Shorter days are coming, and I walk in my garden to meet my friend, the hedgehog. He walks around, poking the ground, making little grunting sounds. If I talk to him, he stops and listens, turning his little nose towards me. No camera – then he wouldn’t listen. To think that already 30 million years ago he was here. A sweet character. Hopefully he will survive and outlive mankind.

A short shower, and I know some delicate worms will be good food for my friend.

Rounding the glass house, I caught the last sunrays in a Cosmos chocamocha – which sent us a fiery…

…goodnight.