Last December, on a grey and gloomy day much like today, I wrote out my goals for the garden for 2015. Re-reading that blog post a year later, I’m amazed to see how much of what I set out to do I actually accomplished. Discovering this was a big surprise, but after only a few minutes of thought…
Broadwoodside is the garden of Robert and Anna Dalrymple. Located some 20 miles east of Edinburgh in Gifford, East Lothian, Broadwoodside is a garden of subtle humour and artful plantings. When the Dalrymples bought the property in the late 1990s, it was nothing but a collection of derelict farm buildings. Since then, under their direction, gardener…
Does your garden suffer from the blahs? You know, that late season feeling when everything looks past its best before date and a walk around the garden drags you down? That’s how my garden has been looking recently, and that’s how I’ve been feeling. But I may have found a remedy. To prepare for a…
England’s Scampston Hall is known for its Walled Garden designed by the Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf. Within the confines of an 18th century kitchen garden in North Yorkshire, Oudolf created a series of garden ‘rooms,’ using hedges as walls. Using hedges to divide a garden into discrete spaces is not a new idea, in England or elsewhere. Far…
Naumkeag is one of America’s finest gardens. Located in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and designed over a period of 30 years from 1925-1956, the garden reflects the desires of the last owner, Mabel Choate, and the skills of her friend and collaborator, the landscape architect Fletcher Steele. Pushing the boundaries of the old Beaux Arts traditions, together they…
“A natural clearing in a wood is a glade. But a perfectly round clearing the same size, in the same wood, becomes a garden.” … Juan Grimm, Chilean landscape architect Ten years ago,…
Over the last week, as part of a tour I’ve been leading through gardens in Scotland and the north of England, I’ve been fortunate enough to see four earth works created by Charles Jencks. Jencks is an American architectural theorist, writer and landscape architect who has lived in Scotland for many years and now divides his…
Beside our house, next to a wooden deck that is rarely used, is a juniper planted when the house was built in 1969. Or to put it more accurately, beside the house and next to the deck are the remains of one. For the last few years, the juniper has been slowly dying. The photo below shows how…
A month ago, the area at the top of the front steps at Glen Villa looked like this. Now it looks like this. We built the drystone wall that appears in the ‘before’ picture a few years after we moved into Glen Villa. We needed a wall because we had cut into the hillside to…
One of the first projects I tackled after we moved into Glen Villa in the late 1990s was what has become the Yin/Yang. A low, circular stone wall on the Big Lawn was full of overgrown highbush cranberry bushes. (I wish I had a photo to show you, but I don’t.) I loved the bushes with their…