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October 20, 2011 | The best water features in Europe or even the world are to be found in the hills near Rome. For inspiration and ideas there are three gardens with which to cram a life-time of sketches and ideas. Particularly if you could step back in time and help yourself to the purse of a Cardinal. My three favourites are these: Diana of [...]  May 25, 2011 | Acqui Termi : Hot Baths succulents date Aqui Terme. Town of roses and water. Show-off fountains and sparkling expanses of wet marble. Sulpherous water gushes out of two rusty pipes in the best piazza in town: Piazza delle bollente. Steam rises up and a smell of rotting eggs. It is for drinking – a purgative. Magnolia grandiflora [...] October 25, 2010 | Border patrol: What looks good in the dog days Once upon a time in the garden in winter, borders were put to bed, plants neatly clipped back to ground level and there was loads of bare shiney turned-over earth. A shrub or two, carefully chosen for seasonal merit, would break up the lovely monotony of the tilled soil. Nothing wrong with this at all [...] October 10, 2010 | Sculpture gazing in Sussex Flicking through a magazine, I came across pictures of a fish on a bicycle and a rubber palm tree and knew that I had to drive down towards the Sussex Downs to take a better look. These and other provoking works of contemporary British sculpture, are set in the wooded grounds of the Cass Foundation [...] October 3, 2010 | Oh lovely Damascus. Damascene rose, damask fabric and as the guidebook would have it, Dimashq. The old town is an ellipse – bounded more or less by walls and divided up into different districts – the original pattern is christian, jewish, muslim. The oldest inhabited city in the world, perhaps. The Romans came and went, Tamerlane shot through, [...] September 2, 2010 | Il Sacro Bosco. The Garden of Dreams. Il Sacro Bosco is a wierd and perplexing garden set in a ravine below the town of Bomarzo in the Sabine Hills. The Orsini palace, scowling above, is built on an outcrop of tufa, the local volcanic rock. Below it, hidden in a fold of the land, a collection of giant statues carved out of [...] August 14, 2010 | The World's Best Nurseries Series: No 1. Whenever I go plant shopping, lingering time is built in. The notebook, pencil and camera tag along. There is nothing quite like a good nursery to give ideas for planting combinations. Or to offer up a completely new herbaceous ingredient. Experimental candidates in pots make it into the car boot to take home and [...] July 27, 2010 | Hestercombe garden: a lesson in stone Garden designers like to talk about hard and soft landscaping. These two divide roughly into stone and flowers and in an historical context, Edwin Lutyens, architect, was to the first as the booted and bespectacled Gertrude Jekyll was to the second. She was 46 to his 21 when their collaboration started and the two [...] July 20, 2010 | Find your inner child at Terra Botanica TERRA BOTANICA. Never heard of it? Just opened, it’s France’s brand spanking new theme park. All about plants and set handily, for us Brits, in the Maine et Loire region. Talked about and in the planning for 12 years, the first digger came onto the 11 hectare site only two and a half years [...] July 5, 2010 | Hampton Court palace flower show 2010: some impressions in aid of Over active bladders It could be considered the second best. Chelsea Flower Show is Cinderella’s slipper. Everyone wants to try it on. Hampton Court seems to have lurked in the shadow of the sister’s rhinestone bedecked footwear. A plea must be made to let Hampton topple the haughty dominance of its slender [...] |
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