For the last ten days I’ve been touring gardens in Scotland and the north of England. A few days ago the group I’m hosting stopped to investigate two prehistoric standing stones. Their setting could not be more prosaic — a hayfield close to a busy highway, not far from the city of York — but the…
Yesterday I arrived in Edinburgh and tomorrow I begin a tour of gardens in southern Scotland and northern England. This tour is similar to one I hosted last September, which means I’ll be taking this year’s group to many of the same places I visited then. On the 2015 tour I was seeing some gardens for…
This summer I’ve been watching what used to be a manicured lawn turn into a meadow. Seeing the changes month to month has shown that what pleased me in June … became even better in July. I was thrilled. Was the transformation from lawn to meadow going to be as…
“No matter how panoramic its scope, a view of surrounding countryside becomes a genuine garden picture only when it has been framed.” – Penelope Hobhouse Recently I came across this statement from the English garden writer and designer Penelope Hobhouse. I read it quickly, nodded in agreement, then paused and read it again. Did I agree? Does…
Yesterday’s Open Garden Day was a fabulously exhausting experience. Some 325 people attended, and the feed-back was incredibly positive. Best of all, we raised over $6000 for the Massawippi Foundation — which means we can keep building trails through the land we’ve conserved, opening to the public a beautiful area previously inaccessible and helping more and more…