Category Archives: Garden travel and tours

Cotswold Garden Tour of Hidcote, Highgrove and private gardens

Chipping Campden is a ‘garden town’ in the Cotswolds

Chipping Campden is a small market town in the Cotswolds, described as ‘the most beautiful village street now left on the island’ (G.M. Trevelyan English social history, 1944). The Cotswolds is an area of gently rolling hills famous for its sleepy villages, fine gardens and concentrated ‘Englishness’. The June tour from Cotswold Walks starts with 3 days visiting its private gardens. They are open (for charity) only for a week in June. After that the guests move to another Cotswold town (Barnsley, Bibury or Cirencester) for visits to other gardens, including:

Hidcote Manor was designed and created by an American, Major Lawrence Johnston and examplifies the Arts and Crafts style of garden design with well-designed garden rooms and linking spaces.

Rockcliffe garden was designed by its owner, Emma Keswick and her taste shines through the the design.

Temple Guiting Manor garden was designed by a well-known designer at the Chelsea Flower Show, Jinny Blom

Barnsley House Garden was owned and designed by Rosemary Verey

Highgrove is the country home of HRH Prince of Wales. He has had a remarkable success as owner, patron, designer and part-time gardener.

Asthall Manor garden is owned and designed by Julian and Isabel Bannerman, who also help Prince Charles with the design of Highgrove.

Chelsea Flower Show, Sissinghurst, Wisley and Tatton Park Garden Tour

Chelsea Flower Show garden tour

Chelsea Flower Show Garden Tour

The three main reasons for visiting the Chelsea Flower Show:

to see the show of flowers in the great tent
to see the show gardens which surround the great tent
garden-related shopping

The show is international. Flowers, products and garden designers come from around the world. So do the visitors. The demand for tickets is high and unless you buy a ticket long in advance of the show, or try your luck with ticket touts, there is little chance of getting in.

Sissinghurst Castle Garden Tour

Sissinghurst Garden Tour

Sissinghurst Castle Garden is, quite simply, the most famous garden in England. This is partly on account of its high design quality and partly because of the fame of its creators: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson.

Wisley RHS Garden Tour

RHS Wisley Garden Tour

RHS Wisley is the home garden Royal Horticultural Society. It has a fantastic collection of flowering plants in every category: herbaceous plants, Alpine plants, flowering shrubs, trees – everything.

Tatton Park Garden Tour

Tatton Park Garden is set in a vast park designed by Lancelot Capability Brown. The garden has a Red Book by Humphry Repton and was largely designed by Joseph Paxton (who also designed the Crystal Palace in London) and was planned to give views of the Brown lake and deer park.

Bring the royal barge, Gloriana, to Greenwich

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Bringing Gloriana to Greenwich is a great idea

As explained on the video about Greenwich Park, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I were rowed from Whitehall Palace to Greenwich Palace in a royal barge. So keeping Gloriana in Greenwich is a really great idea. The Gloriana is a 94-foot-long (29 m) royal barge which was privately commissioned as a tribute to Queen Elizabeth II. The project to build Gloriana was initiated by Lord Sterling, who liked the idea of a waterborne tribute to the Queen for her Diamond Jubilee in 2012. The Greenwich Park video has a short clip of the Gloriana passing some suburban houses. She would look much better traveling between Whitehall and Greenwich – preferably with wealthy tourists paying a fortune for each trip. It costs £2,800 for a ceremony in the London Eye. How about £10,000 for a couple of hours on Gloriana? I would see it as a contribution to London’s urban design.

Is Greenwich Park London’s most interesting Royal Park?

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I think the answer is ‘yes’ – and it should certainly be included in London garden tours. For a start, it is the oldest of London’s Royal Parks. Greenwich has associations with the period in British history most loved by the BBC and English schools. Only the 1930s and ’40s rival the Tudors.
Greenwich was enclosed by Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, who also built what became the Royal Palace of Placentia. Henry VIII was born here. So was his daughter, Elizabeth I. The design and the design history are also of great interest. Greenwich Park began as a late-medieval Hunting Park with an Early Renaissance garden. It was then influenced by the Baroque Style in the seventeenth century by the Serpentine style in the eighteenth century and by the Gardenesque Style in the nineteenth century. The green laser beam is a Post-Abstract twenty-first century addition – and a great idea. The designers who influenced the park include Inigo Jones, André Le Nôtre, John Evelyn Christopher Wren, Lancelot Brown and John Claudius Loudon.

Persian garden tour April and May 2014 Iran

London Sightseeing – a cruise on a River Thames Boat

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How do Londoners and tourists regard the river Thames? This video was taken on a London City Cruise and you can hear the waterman’s commentary. I guess he loves the river but, like Joseph Conrad, sees it as being as much a place of darkness as a place of light – while also being a river of greatness, cruelty and folly, a place where kings are cruel and greedy, where most architects are fools and where the people remain cheerful, cynical and long-suffering. My view is that the river and its banks need enlightened planners, brilliant architects and imaginative landscape architects. That, and some money, could put London high in lists of the world’s top waterfront cities. The Mayor of London and the Greater London Authority (GLA) put their weight behind the 2012 Olympic Bid. They should now accept the challenge of getting near the top of these lists:

Great Waterfronts of the World
17 International Cities With Wonderful Waterfronts
World’s Top Waterfront Cities
Top 10 waterfront cities in the world

I do not know whether Joseph Conrad belonged to The Company of Watermen and Lightermen but he had many years experience as a seaman on the high seas, on the River Thames and in the West India Docks. I’m sure he would like to have London on these lists. He loved London, loved the Thames and lived in Tachbrook St, London SW1V 2NG.

Garden Design and Landscape Architecture

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