Oh, my. Luscious.

Kiftsgate Court: A Garden Review

Kiftsgate Court is one of those English gardens included on many garden tours, in part because it is so conveniently located, just down the road from Hidcote, the iconic garden created by the Anglo-American Lawrence Johnston. The gardens at Kiftsgate were created over the last hundred years by three generations of women — grandmother, mother and daughter —…

The wrought-iron will rust eventually but we can scrape and oil it when it does.

Try and Try Again

The old saying is a good one: if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. There’s a meme in the gardening world started by Bonney Lassie at call Tell the Truth Tuesday. Despite my fair share of failures, I’ve never joined in. But La Seigneurie, one of the newest parts of my Quebec garden, fits…

A curving parth at Througham Court leads across a field to a gate banners flying in the distance.

Paths with Pizazz

Many garden paths are ordinary, designed simply to get you from one place in the garden to another. Grass paths, the simplest and least costly type of path to make, appear in gardens so routinely that they almost disappear. Occasionally, though, you’ll see a path that stands out. The grass path below is an example. It…

This photo shows a wood chip path at Holbrooke Gardens, an English garden specializing in informality.

Garden Paths

Working on Timelines, the 3 km trail at Glen Villa that opened last weekend, started me thinking about trails and paths more generally, and particularly about the way the size, shape and the material a path is made of affect how we respond. What a difference there is, for instance, between the effect of a winding…