Sudeley Castle and Gardens

Sudeley Castle, in the Cotswolds, is a historically fascinating place; the gardens have specific historic features that tie them to the time of Henry VIII.  It's also one of the rare castles still lived in by the family that owns it, Lady Elizabeth Ashcombe and her children.  They have opened the castle to the public to help cover their costs, and it is a popular attraction.

One of the famous features is the Queen's Garden, a four-square rose garden with 80 rose varieties. The name recognizes the four English Queens who have visited or lived here.

A view from the air is the best way to understand the 'four-square' garden design, here to the lower right of the buildings.  Demarcated by two dark hedges south-east of the buildings. this design of four quarters around a central square is one of the oldest in gardening, stemming from early Persian gardens.

The Queen's Garden today is a Victorian replanting of an original Elizabethan rose garden, overseen by a celebrated English rosarian.

Here is part of just one-quarter of that garden.

Looking right across the central pool is the chapel, which we will visit in a moment.

One of the other well-known gardens is the Knot Garden, a design in small sharply pruned Boxwood, said to be modelled after the design in one of Queen Elizabeth I's dresses.

The garden and castle are perhaps best known as having been visited or lived in by no fewer than four English Queens.  Anne Boleyn  was the first; she visited three times when married to Henry VIII.  Later came Catherine Parr, Henry's last wife. who remarried and came to live at Sudeley after Henry died.  Lady Jane Grey was one of her attendants.  Lady Jane later became the famous 'Nine-Days-Queen' and was beheaded at the Tower of London.  Finally Queen Elizabeth I visited on three occasions.

Among those four queens, Catherine Parr was the only one buried at Sudeley, now commemorated with  a raised life-size effigy in marble.  Found in the memorial chapel (above), the tomb has become a place of pilgrimage.  Catherine Parr is the only English queen buried at a private castle.

 

Claude Monet's Garden in Giverny

One of the most interesting gardens we've visited is Monet's garden in the village of Giverny, west of Paris.  Monet lived from 1840 to 1926, and is viewed as the founder of Impressionism, a school of painting that was viewed as radical in its time.  Impressionist painters moved from the studio to the outdoors, and painted 'en plain air'.  They emphasized the importance of changing light conditions and often painted the same scene several times over the seasons.

Monet bought the house you see in the background and started a garden where he could paint.  It was a practical combination, though Monet did have a large studio on site.

Here, in the front of the house, is a mixed planting of red and mauve Geraniums.  Monet's art today has fetched enormous prices, one painting selling for $88 million recently!

And this is the view out the front door of his house, which is also open to visit.  Imagine this view in Monet's time probably before the trees were here.  The garden has eight gardeners, including students on internships from school.

But Monet was not satisfied with painting flowers, so he purchased land to the south, across the railway track, and put in a large pond where he grew waterlilies.  He then embarked on painting the waterlilies and produced nearly 400 paintings over 30 years.  Today you get here through a short tunnel under the tracks.

This allowed him to paint the changing light conditions as the light reflected from both plants and water.  This led to his most famous paintings, the waterlily paintings, the largest of which are on display in two purpose-built rooms at the Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris.

The other oft-painted feature of this garden is the small bridge copied in many gardens around the world, and painted repeatedly.  I waited 15 minutes to get a picture of just Mrs. F.G. but eventually took it with other visitors in place.

This is one of the enormous waterlily painting at the Musee de l'Orangerie.  There are two oval rooms with natural light from the ceiling, hosting the paintings which are 6,5 feet tall, and about 50 feet long.   They were officially given to France on the day after Armistice Day in 1918, in the hope of future peace.  They are one of the most colossal paintings of the past century.

Crathes Castle Gardens

Crathes Castle is a fascinating place to visit, on the way from Balmoral Castle to Aberdeen in the Highlands of Scotland.  You can see both the interior of the castle and the garden, and both are amazing.  The garden is a large diverse walled garden, and the castle has original painted ceilings that are unique in my (limited) experience.

This is the castle, dating from 1596, built during the troubled reign of Mary Queen of Scots.  Prior to this castle being built, the land was gifted to the Burnetts by Robert the Bruce in 1323.  The shot is taken from the croquet lawn inside the walled garden, the enormous Yew hedge forming the gateway.

And looking down on the rest of the garden from the castle you can see again the Yew hedge, including a pruned 'locomotive' bordering the garden.

Not all the garden looks like this, but the area dedicated to flowers is spectacular!  The castle and garden are now managed by the National Trust of Scotland, with a team of seven gardeners.

It takes the gardening team weeks just to prune the huge hedge.

One of the unique things that stuck in my memory was the 'Gold Garden'.  You've heard of white gardens, but in all the gardens we have visited this is the only time I've seen a 'Gold Garden'!

At the time we visited, nearly 30 years ago, photography was not allowed inside the building, but if you ever get there, the original interior painted ceilings are amazing!

Inverewe

It's bee a busy week, sorry I haven't posted sooner.

I'm thinking we should leave the landscape gardens behind and go back to some of our favourite gardens in England and Scotland, gardens that actually have flowers!  Inverewe is on the far north-west coast of northern Scotland, and it can grow some amazing plants (like Palm trees), because of the passing warm water current, the Gulf Stream.

Inverewe was established by Osgood Mackenzie starting from a very barren landscape in 1862.  Tons of soil were brought in to create conditions for growing, starting with a shelterbelt of pines to protect the area.  Today it has been described as the best garden in Scotland due to its outstanding collection of plants, especially trees, from around the world.

The highlight for most visitors is the walled kitchen garden, replete with flowers as well as veggies.  It sits in a cove facing Loch Ewe, terraced up the slope, providing a very protected space for growing.

This is simply an outstanding space to wander through as you enter the garden, now run by the National Trust for Scotland.

The house, built in the 1930s after the original burned down, now functions as a museum, with beautiful flower borders outside.

And beyond that is the beautiful parkland of trees, including many species of Rhododendron.

I leave you with the outstanding selfie of yours truly, standing under the huge Gunnera, the first time I had seen that plant up close.  In my mind those are still enormous rhubarb leaves!

Chatsworth House

We return to England with the gardens at Chatsworth House, perhaps the grandest example of a landscape garden in England, no flowers but plenty of interesting landscape features.  One of the largest and grandest of English estates, the house and gardens are over 400 years old, and have been in the hands of the Cavendish family ever since, a family ruled over by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire.

Chatsworth House gardens have been built and rebuilt over the centuries.  At one time the gardens featured a very formal layout, not unlike those at Versailles.  But Capability Brown, a uniquely English personality came along with his rebellion against formal gardens and swept it all away.

The formal gardens were replaced by acres of lawns, with a focus on fountains as well, though many statues, like this one, were retained.

The most celebrated water feature is not a fountain, but a cascade, a long set of stairs down which water runs in an extensive set of tiny waterfalls.

It's a popular feature as you can see, though they do try to keep the kids out of the actual cascade.  When we were there they turned the water on at 1 pm and the crowds were already gathered.

The other big water feature is the Emperor Fountain, one of the highest jets of water in any fountain run by natural water pressure.  It is fed by water from a large lake dug on top of the moors.

The rock garden is one of the other interesting features, built not from small rocks, but from large boulders!

At one time an enormous glass house was a popular feature, but it was heated by coal and during WWII no coal was available for such purposes, so it was torn down.  It has been replaced by a maze.

I just loved the wavy pattern of this hedge.

The 2.5 acre kitchen gardens are a much more recent feature, laid out by the inspired Duchess in 1991.  They include of course an extensive area of cutting flowers, destined for bouquets in the house.  In this way flowers have returned to the gardens at Chatsworth after nearly 300 years.

The Gardens at Versailles

 The gardens at Versailles are overwhelming, they are so huge!  If the Boboli Gardens were the start of making gardens bigger and better, the gardens at Versailles were the pinnacle of that trend.  Extending over 2000 acres, these gardens featured very few flowers but dozens of fountains, as well of course, as the Palace of Versailles.  Everything was to be bigger and better for the Sun King, Louis XIV!

These are the extent of flowers in the garden, a formal design of the Fleur de Lis on the parterre immediately behind the palace with its Hall of Mirrors.

Beyond this is a spectacular view over the distant lake, a huge fountain in the foreground under renovation when we visited.  The view faces west so the king could watch the sun set.

If one were to wander to the left and look over the edge, you see a very formal arrangement of trees and shrubs in pots known as Versailles Boxes.  In fact many of these are orange trees and they will be moved to the Orangery, a huge room under your feet for the winter.

Looking the other way is a formal walkway with fountains to the sides.  My primary impression after walking through the garden was of the fountains, dozens of them.

We walked down the main hill and discovered the maze of 'bosquets', smaller garden rooms enclosed by trees, each bosquet having a specific theme.  This one was obviously a dance of fountains.  These jets of water danced up and down in time to music, a popular feature for visitors.

Another fountain, the Apollo Fountain, one of the more spectacular ones.  Water was a challenge here, so it was piped from a distance.  It was said the fountains were turned on and off as the king progressed around the park.

Another view of the Apollo Fountain.  I was surprised by the number of visitors, 16,000,000 per year!  That works out to 44,000 a day!  It's one of the most popular attractions in the world.

The lake, known as the Grand Canal, is just under a mile long, and provided a place for gondolas gifted by kings of Italy.  It also provided a basin where the water from all the fountains eventually ended up.  The gardens at Versailles were an enormous influence on the development of English landscape gardens and other gardens around the world.

The Boboli Gardens, Florence

It looks like I'm stuck with the tail end of winter here, so I'm going to go back to some of gardens we've visited which I was quite enjoying.  The Boboli Gardens sit on the south bank of the Arne in Florence, Italy.  We visited them when we went to Italy for a tour.  For Mrs. F.G. it was a return and the trip was wonderful!

Florence is of course that famous city of culture, featuring the Duomo, completed in 1436 and home to Bruneshelli's dome.  There are three statues of David, and most tourists see the one in the Uffizi Gallery, but the one standing outside the town hall is the more appropriate one, for 'David' was intended as a political statement!

Since we were in town we went off by ourselves to visit the gardens, where we wandered for three hours.  The entrance is the   TPitti Palace originally home to the Pitti family, but bought by the Medici family in 1549.  The gardens were laid out for the Medicis.

As you enter the dominant feature is the statue of Neptune, in the centre of a large pool.  You can continue up the hill beyond this. or you can turn to the right and follow down a long wide path.

This is that long wide path, wide enough to be a road, (in fact it was originally a road) and lined with statues.  It was built for the ladies to stroll down and admire those statues.

At the bottom we come to another large reflecting pool, with an island in the centre, the Isolotto.  We were there on a day of perfect reflections.

The statuary was amazing, no flowers but plenty of sculptures!

At the other end of the gardens is the famous grotto, a much copied element of 16th century gardens.  This garden would be one that wealthy English Lords saw on their 'grand tour'. from which they brought back ideas to home, creating English landscape gardens.